World-Wide-Matel

I finished the first module of the distance learning course on intellectual property rights today and I thought I might put make a short write up of some of the take-aways. 

We rarely solve big problems; we just go beyond them, usually by redefining our goals and priorities and often by employing knowledge and technologies that were unavailable when the problem was initially defined.  In other words, our vision of solutions for the future is often limited because those solutions have not been invented yet. We have a phase “overtaken by events” (OBE’D). It refers to facts, ideas or plans that are invalidated by subsequent events.  Most problems are not really solved; they are just OBE’D. 

Stuff happens sometimes for no reason we can understand

The future is uncertain by definition, but we have learned to manage risk.  Our increasing ability to identify and manage risk is one of the too often overlooked foundations of our complex modern civilization but we never eliminate it and there are many situations where there is so much uncertainty that we cannot even properly assess the risk, i.e. figure out the odds.  (I read a couple good books on this.  I recommend “the Black Swan” & “Against the Gods.”) This is what drives people crazy.   It seems counterintuitive to some, who seem to think that if we could solve our big problems if just worked hard enough and planned well enough.   We things go badly wrong, they look to blame someone.   Well, sometimes we just have uncertainty.  Shit happens in ways nobody could have reasonably predicted and sometimes in ways nobody could have predicted at all.

Not all of this is bad, however.  In fact it is mostly good.  There are upside and downside surprises but in the long run the upside surprises are more important.   Why?  Even if the ups and downs are distributed randomly, we can apply human intelligence to adapt to them.   Within broad parameters, the quality of our lives depends less on the good or bad luck we experience than on the responses we make to what comes along. We have to use an iterative approach that learns from experience and changes responses to changing circumstances.

Einstein was right when he said that we cannot solve problems with the same kind of  thinking that we used when we created them.  

The best system is not one that plans in detail for all the challenges but rather one that is robust enough to adapt to changing conditions and exploit opportunities, one that embraces the statistical nature of the future and takes advantage of it. We need more of a planning process than a precise plan.  We cannot anticipate all the events but we can have processes in place that can recover from setback to adapt to changes. I think of it like a tool box and portfolio.   In an uncertain world, you have to diversity and empower those closest to evolving events. This is how markets work, BTW.

This is a harder sell than the dishonest or self-deceptive statement that you have anticipated and planned for all the eventualities.  Most people crave certainty and they love those who claim to have it, even when they know or should know it is bogus comfort.   We make systematic errors in the direction of imposing patterns of certainty where none exist.  That is why we think clouds look like Snoopy or Albert Einstein.  There is even a five dollar word for it “apophenia”.

Anyway the simple advice is to find or create adaptive robust systems that can survive downside shocks and move quickly to exploit upside opportunities, all the time understanding that the Lady Fortune’s Wheel  never stops turning.  (BTW I am thinking of this in terms of Boethius, not Pat Sajack and Vanna White) It can pull you up and down and some big things can come up pretty fast.

Now you’re cooking with gas

One upside surprise that is a real game-changer is the recent technological advance that allows us to get natural gas from shale deposits. In the last couple of years, we have made available natural gas deposits with more than the energy potential of all the oil in Arabia. A solution that was unavailable and largely unforeseen five years ago will change all our lives … soon.  I wrote about this a couple of months ago as I drove through the Pennsylvanian coal – and now natural gas – country.

Natural gas is the perfect partner for wind energy, since gas plants can be turned on and off relatively easily.   Wind is very good when it is blowing but it can cut off quickly.   In other words, it is unreliable w/o backup.  Nature gas is the backup.  

Natural gas can help us squeeze oil out of our transportation network. According to the linked article, “the chief obstacle to developing a natural gas infrastructure capable of supplying service stations and highway rest stops is regulatory. If that is removed—and here we do need government action—we could expect to see trucks, buses, and cars running on natural gas in a relatively short period of time. The reduction in greenhouse gas emissions would be considerable.”

This new energy future will not only help us free ourselves from the despots who control most of the world’s oil reserves (it seems like kind of a divine joke that most of the world’s easy to get oil is under such regimes) but it will also reduce greenhouse gas emissions w/o the draconian measures contemplated just a short time ago. Natural gas is cleaner than oil and much cleaner than coal in terms of pollution and in terms of CO2.

So a problem that was intractable with the conditions and technology of 2005 could be party solved in ways that nobody really anticipated. But we have to use our intelligence to make an upside surprise into good fortune … before it is OBE’D or Fortune's wheel takes another turn. 

Posted by Broadnax at 09:54 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The big Washington blizzard didn’t make AEI cancel the session on new American demographics and the discussion of “The Next 100 Million: America in 2050” with the author Joel Kotkin and a panel of experts chaired by Michael Barone.

Decline overdone

Experts have been saying that America is in decline since - even before - we became an independent nation. Kotkin acknowledges that someday these critics will be correct, but not today, and he paints an optimistic picture of our American future. America has a lot of advantages going into the next generation. It starts with demographics.

Americans still remember how to have kids; it is evidently no longer a universal skill

The U.S. is unique among developed country since we have a positive rate of natural increase. It is not very much above replacement level, but that is more than others, some of which are almost in free fall. America is also an anomaly in that in some of our suburbs wealthy, well-educated women sometimes have three or more kids. (I recall reading an article about the big families in affluent Loudon County next door to us.)  

We also still get millions of immigrants. That means that the America is growing older slower than other developed countries and the American labor force will continue to grow through 2050, while others suffer greater or lesser proportional decline in their productive populations relative to their dependent ones. The interesting thing about his data was that it also shows that the world's most populous country - China - will begin to suffer labor shortages (at least for skilled labor) very soon.  The Chinese labor force will start to decline as early as 2015 (yes, five years from now) as a result of their perhaps necessary but draconian one-child policy. (Long term predictions are always tough, but by 2050 the U.S. labor force is projected to rise by 42%; China’s will drop by 10% and Japan’s labor force will decline by an astonishing 44%).

More old people, fewer young workers 

This labor force decline will be accompanied by a big growth in the elderly dependent population, both in relative and absolute terms. The world has never experienced anything like this before and our lack of models will require adaptions we cannot fully anticipate. We are truly going where no human societies have gone before.

But America will suffer these declines later and less severely than most others. In addition, the U.S. has a very robust & adaptive economic system. National power is based on economic strength, innovation and demographic clout. Among the great nations of the last generation, only the U.S. will still have these elements in abundance in the next generation.

Managing genteel decline not the same as planning robust growth

This U.S. outlook contributes to disagreements with old allies. For example, the Europeans can also make demographic projections. They see that their populations will decline and their economies will grow much slower than ours. When your population will get smaller and your economy won’t grow much, you don’t worry very much about promising cuts in CO2. You need different policies if you are managing a genteel decline than when you are planning for robust growth.

The U.S. will change internally too. The growth of the last fifty years went mostly to the coasts.   The next fifty years will see a return to the heartland. Kotkin doesn’t say that all the little praire towns will be back, but space and affordable housing will draw people away from the coasts. He says that the whole idea of suburbs has become meaningless. There is more a blending of suburbs, cities and rural areas. Kotkin foresees what he calls an archipelago of villages. More people would be connected by new media in greener and less crowded communities. It sounds a lot like the Loudoun County communities mentioned in the article I linked above.

Today's ethnic & racial categories will not mean much in 2050

Much has been said about the changing ethnic composition of the U.S. population and in 2050 the white native born population is  projected to drop to around 50% of the labor force.  But how significant will this be? Kotkin pointed out how foreign the large immigration of Irish seemed in the 19th Century.  We just forget how different earlier waves of immigrants had been and how completely they have been integrated into our society. When my grandfather and his brother Felix came to the U.S., they spoke no English and probably had never seen an American before. There is probably no population on earth today that is so "foreign." 

The younger generation doesn't really care very much about race, with vast majorities in favor of interracial marriage, so by 2050 today's categories will be as meaningless as some of the national and religious distinctions made in our grandparents' childhoods. In other words, by 2050 nobody will care. 

Still some challenges and skills mismatched

The road to this bright happy future is not necessarily certain. We have a challenge of education, not so much college but technical. We might, in fact, be pushing too many kids into college when the more appropriate skills might be technical. Our community and technical colleges should be given a bigger role as providers of final or working degrees rather than way-stations to four-year colleges. Kotkin thinks it is just a problem of incentives. We reward careers in finance and law more than we do those who actually make useful things. If that changes, so will our career paths.

We have been able to import skilled labor, but that might be slowing. We have some competition now.  Places like Canada & Australia are also pleasant and welcoming like the U.S. They are also "countries of aspiration" and they drawing in some of the skilled immigrants.  There are also now more opportunities in many source countries, as people around the world reap the benefits of market liberalization reforms of past decades. Indian engineers, for example, now may have good opportunities at home.

The general pool of attractive potential immigrants is also shrinking, as birth rates drop even in those place that traditionally had very high rates of growth, such at Mexico and parts of Asia. A good example of what this pattern can look like comes from South Korea, which a couple decades ago sent millions of immigrants to the U.S. and now absorbs its own population growth, which is now much lower than that of the U.S. 

We need more Engineers & plumbers and fewer leaf blowers & Lawyers

We Americans screw ourselves, however. Canada or Australia favor the skills their countries need.  An immigrant with skills has a better chance of getting into those places. Our immigration policies give too little weight to the skills and education we can use in our economy. We are too "fair". We don’t need to import any more unskilled labor or even worse - people who don’t plan to labor at all.  We have the right to ask potential immigrants what they will contribute to our country. Besides the relatively small numbers of bona-fides refugees, we have no moral duty to admit anybody. As long as we will limit total numbers and we have a choice, we should choose the best and the brightest, not people we need to train before they can operate a leaf blower.

Unfortunately, unskilled labor can create its own demand.  My personal complaint is against leaf blowing. That is usually a job that just need not be done at all and if unskilled labor wasn’t so cheap maybe we wouldn’t do it very often. You can learn to use a leaf blower in about thirty seconds.  We don’t need more of those things. We are better off with people with useful skills. Some jobs - such as leaf blowing - are worth less than zero. I have discussed the value of doing nothing (with specific reference to leaf blowing) here & here.

Anyway, the AEI event gave me something to think about.  I will have to buy the book and read the details. I have to say – once again – that we are really lucky to have these kinds of events offered free or cheaply to anybody with the inclination to listen. 

Posted by Broadnax at 02:28 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I gave my staff the option to telework today, anticipating the dreadful white monster said to be slouching toward us and expected to blanket Washington with 16-24 inches of wet snow by tomorrow morning. (The record snowfall in Washington is 28 inches, set in 1922.  If you want to follow the storm's progress the hashtag is #snowpocalypse.) I did that yesterday morning. Soon after, we got a notice telling us that telecommuting should be encouraged.  Good.  Now we got a further notice telling us that the government employees will get four hours early dismissal and this goes for teleworkers too. Not good. I know this is done in the spirit of fairness and of course we will comply with the directive.  I know that I will sound like a scrooge, but it really doesn’t make sense.

Presumably we are giving people four hours off so that they can flee the confines of Washington before they are frozen in place by the fierce winter storm. This is smart, especially around here where we are dependent on transportation systems that seem especially sensitive to weather.  But our telecommuting decision has already addressed that problem for those working from home.  They are already safely hunkered down in their warm cocoons and don’t need those four hours to come safely home.  If it were up to me, I would just let them work the full day.

I have long been a supporter of telecommuting and encourage it to the greatest extent possible. I fought to protect and extend telecommuting when I ran the IIP-Speaker office and have written in support. It is good for morale, the environment and productivity where appropriately employed. But telecommuting is one of those things precariously balanced on a slippery steep slope and it starts the downward slide to perdition when it transitions from being a mutually beneficial working arrangement to a type of defined right for an employee.

Social pressures weaken when employees are away from their bosses and colleagues. Working alone requires a lot more self-discipline than working where everybody can see you. There is significant temptation to use telecommuting as a type of semi-vacation day. That is why telecommuting is not for everybody and why it can never become a right.  A few people will abuse it and – sorry for the cliché – ruin it for everybody. Managers have to maintain an arbitrary power over telecommuting, i.e. we have to have the authority to call telecommuters at a moment’s notice and change or assign different work.  It is also important to specify that if telecommuters cannot do the work from home, they must make other arrangements.  In other words, you cannot claim equipment failure as an excuse. The telecommuter has MORE responsibility at home than he/she has at work.  Responsibility is a price of the freedom and flexibility of telework. 

I have a simple kind of karma rule for life. If things are not too big a difference, I call them equal.  My analogy is the vending machine. If I put my money in and the machine rips me off, I don’t complain.  On the other hand, if it gives me too much change, I don’t try to give it back.   It is just too much effort to care very much and if you care only in one direction, you are being dishonest.

Work and trust are similar two-way propositions. I don’t complain when co-workers take a little extra time at lunch and don’t expect complaints when people have to stay a little longer to finish work.  As a worker, I am actually in favor of leaving a little more on the table, i.e. I try to put a little more effort in than I think I “need” to. Since I assume that I overestimate my contribution (as we all do) this probably makes it objectively about fair. Most people are okay with that, but there are always a few bad apples who try to take as much as they can and give back little or nothing.

I learned these things from hard experience, BTW.  I will give one example. A few years ago, I couldn’t get in touch with one of my telecommuters for a couple of days. When I finally found him, he told me that his phone and computer had gone down and thought that was a good excuse.   When I asked him what he had done during those two days, he just repeated that he had been unable to work.   I think he was lying about the phone and computer, but that didn’t matter as much as the demonstratable result that he didn’t work for two days.  I made him take those two days as annual leave and took away his telecommuting privileges until he come guarantee that his equipment would work. 

Posted by Broadnax at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A significant part of my pay could be “performance pay” now that I am in the Senior Foreign Service (Senior Executive Service) and don’t get automatic increases.  I didn’t get to compete for performance pay for 2007/8 because of a technicality – Congress acted too late on my class’ promotion and we were not in grade long enough to qualify according to the State Department’s arcane rules.   (Ironically, however, they acted quick enough that I lost my overtime pay in Iraq and ended up taking a pay cut because of my promotion. It won’t be until the middle of next year that I make up the money I lost by being promoted.) This year I just didn’t get performance pay.  I am a little surprised.  

This was the last performance report that included Iraq.  Next year my Iraq experience will be buried under the relative obscurity of this Washington assignment.  If I didn’t deserve performance pay for Iraq, I certainly should not get it for Washington, so my prospects don’t look good. Iraq was about the best I can do.  I am beginning to feel unpopular.

In fairness, my colleagues are doing lots of important things in Embassies overseas and in Washington.  I don’t doubt the merit of those on the list. 

But being a PRT leader in Iraq seemed a bigger deal to the Department when they asked me to take the assignment. They dragged me out of the job I had and made me feel that delay of even a couple of days was disastrous.  It sure seemed important. Of course, the perceived value of a service declines rapidly after that service has been performed and there has, anyway, been a shift in priorities.   You get little advantage being tied to yesterday’s urgency, no matter how important they told you it was at the time.  

I said when I signed on for Iraq that I did NOT do it for career advancement and I was telling the truth.  I remain glad that I volunteered.  I derived immense satisfaction from doing the job there. I worked with great colleagues and I am convinced that there are people alive in Iraq today who would not be had we not done the work we did.   I would not change my decision.

Nevertheless, it bothers me a little to conclude that I would likely have been in a better career position, at least in terms of contacts & assignment prospects, had I not volunteered, had I kept and built on the good job I had in September 2007. Things moved along w/o me while I was literally wandering in the desert.  It is my own fault too. I did a poor job of reconnecting.   I thought I could just pick up where I left off; I was mistaken. 

Chrissy says that I don't get mad enough about these sorts of things and that I need to develop a stronger sense of entitlement. Sometimes the people who make the most noise get the most recognition. I tend to downplay hardships and achievements and I am not prone to anger. I am mad about not being recognized for my Iraq service, but this is about the extent of my rage.

"Do it because it is the right thing to do, but remember that the State Department talks a lot about the importance of the mission and the people who do it, but the bureaucracy has no memory."  That is what I will tell the people who ask my advice on taking on hard assignments.

It is a dreary, depressing day, both in terms of the weather (as you can see from the picture above) and my outlook, but the sky will brighten up and so will my situation.    I plan to wallow in self-pity for a little longer; then I will stop and try to do something useful again.  

Posted by Broadnax at 06:14 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

Alex and I visited the battlefields associated with the Petersburg Campaign and Robert E. Lee’s final retreat.   Petersburg gave the world a taste of what trench warfare would be like.  You go from Federal earthworks to Confederate earthworks.   As in the World War I, the armies were racing around the flanks.  It soon became a grim slog, a war of attrition.  The South could not win this kind of war. They just didn't have enough men or materiel. 

Above is Alex in front of some of the earthworks.  Below is a reconstruction. 

Lee was trying to escape to the west, where he could hook up with General Joe Johnston, while Union forces tried to bottle them up.   Lincoln’s fear was that the war would go on and maybe turn into a guerrilla war.  The Petersburg campaign has that endless war feeling anyway.  They were regularly taking thousands of casualties each DAY.  The soldiers were becoming more accustomed to war and much more cynical. They came to understand that the war in Virginia was ending and nobody wanted to be the last man killed.  There is a good novel about this period called "Last Full Measure" that captures some of the feeling.

Above is a soldiers' house.  It looks like a playhouse, but it held four men.   Below is what is left of the crater. Union miners from Pennsylvania made a tunnel under the Rebel positions and blew up Confederate fortifications.  Unfortunately, the attack didn't go well.  Union troops poured into the crater and many were trapped there. It looks bigger in real life.  You also need to remember that there has been almost 150 years of erosion and filling in.

America’s Civil War was remarkable in its ending.   In France, terror followed revolution.  The Russians and Chinese murdered millions of people in similar situations.  In fact, protracted Civil Wars almost NEVER end without significant retribution and bloodletting.   I think that I can safely say that the ending of the American Civil War was unique in human history.   The victors were generous and the vanquished honorable.  Because it happened as it did, we think of it as inevitable, but the decisions made in April 1865 were not foreordained.

Grant allowed Lee’s soldiers to keep their side arms and their horses.  Robert E. Lee instructed his men to go home and become good citizens.  Most did.   

I know that some scholars talk about the “myth” of reconciliation and point to the problems that persisted. Some people still hold a grudge for Sherman's march through Georgia and the Carolinas. You have to ask the “compared to what?” question.  In most countries, more people die violently AFTER the wars.  Not in America.  Rebel leaders are usually executed.  The lucky ones are only imprisoned or exiled.  Not here. Can you imagine Cuba exiled welcomes back by the regime?  Russian exiles lured back were usually murdered.  

The Civil War was the worst war in American history.  The destruction was horrendous.  Yet after it ended … it ended.  April 1865 was probably the most remarkable month in world history.  This just doesn’t happen very often – or at all.   I think we should take time to think about this.  If others had learned from the Federal-Confederate example, we might have avoided most of the carnage of the 20th Century.   

Above is a battlefield at Five Forks.  When the fight turned into a battle of attrition, most of the engagements were small, but this was a key turning point. Phil Sheridan defeated troops under the unlucky George Pickett, who was off having a fish dinner and didn't return until it was too late. The collapse of the Confederate position at Five Forks led directly to Lee's decision to abandon Richmond & Petersburg.  It was the beginning of the end for the Army of Northern Virginia and for the Southern Confederacy, and so Five Forks is sometimes called the Confederate Waterloo.  There is nothing much to see here today.  The trees and fields have grown back.  It is hard to believe that war was ever close to this peaceful, bucolic place.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I participated in a seminar led by guy who had been on a CORDS team in Vietnam. CORDS (Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support) were supposed to do some of the development and coordination activities done by PRTs.  I was aware of CORDS but through talking to some older guys who knew about them. You cannot find much about them otherwise. It is the forgotten war and maybe the forgotten victory.

The professor pointed out that the insurgency in South Vietnam was decisively defeated after the TET offensive and CORDS cemented the victory.   After that, it became a problem of invasion from North Vietnam.  The popularly held idea that a bunch of insurgents, living with the people in the countryside, overthrew the South Vietnamese regime is just wrong.  We all remember the fall of Saigon, but we often forget that it was conquered by the armies of the North; big armies complete with armor and air support.  It wasn’t little guys in black pajamas.     

The successful counterinsurgency, including CORDS operation, was linked with the disastrous fall of Saigon and because we got the history wrong, usually w/o even thinking much about it, we were unable or unwilling to learn the lessons.  

The strategy associated with the surge worked in Iraq. We went from near defeat in late 2006 to a clear success (call it victory) a year later. I personally saw the change and felt its effects.  It was literally a matter of people dying or not. You can do all the academic analysis you want and round the words until they fit into square holes, but I am morally convinced that thousands of people are alive today because of what we did. PRTs were part of the surge and people like me contributed to the victory in Iraq. 

Our work at the PRTs may be following CORDS down the memory hole. It just doesn’t have many powerful champions and there are detractors. Some people are almost embarrassed that the surge worked, since they had so vociferously predicted its failure. Others have convinced themselves that success would have happened anyway.  Still others deny that we were successful at all since the situation is not a perfect as they could imagine. And then there are those who imply that victory or defeat in Iraq were/are just irrelevant.    

Some of the participants in the seminar asked me how State Department had taken advantage of the unique experience I had gained in Western Anbar. How had we absorbed that knowledge as a learning organization.  This is what they wanted to know.  I thought about it. I thought about it again.   The Marines invited me to Quantico to discuss my experience, several times, I told them. An independent scholar contacted me.  He had read my blog and wanted to see if I could tell him anything else.  At State Department … well, FSI asked me to present to classes of PRT folks going to Iraq.  I was on a panel with four other people and collectively we talked for about an hour.  That was good.  I sponsored my own brown bag lunch to discuss Iraq.   Five people came, all of them my friends just trying to be nice. I wrote a few entries on our State Department wiki, Diplopedia.  I don’t know if anybody read any of them, but information gets stale anyway unless it is converted to knowledge.

The follow up question was something like, “then how do you all learn?”  I mumbled about “reading in” to the cable and reports.

It is hard to be a learning organization because it is hard to turn experience into information and even harder to turn information into useful knowledge. We too often content ourselves with information on paper, or these days on computers.  We can gather all the numbers, metrics, whatever you want to call it, but it has to be converted to useful knowledge and categorized by human intelligence.  Creating useful knowledge usually means putting it into understandable context.  It usually also requires that the person digesting the information is also someone who can make decisions.  You cannot outsource your brains.

As a PRT leader, I had first-hand, primary knowledge. I sometimes didn’t know the significance of my information or how it fit into a bigger picture. It was helpful when someone had the secondary knowledge to evaluate and figure out what my information was part of. That is why a learning organization is stronger and smarter than the individuals in it.  If the information contained in individual minds remains un-harvested, the organization doesn’t learn.  It can be full of smart people who are adept at learning and improvising solutions, but it will lack the synergy of a learning organization. This is our problem.

I have been observing organizations for a long time.  You have to look at the organization as a whole with its own behaviors, not only at the separate individuals because groups are more than a the sum of individuals.  They develop a culture. We all know that individuals can learn, but so can organizations under the right conditions.

I see that many can be episodically learning organizations.  Much depends on characteristics of individuals in charge and the culture they engender. People have to talk and exchange information informally and non-judgmentally. The learning episode stops if anybody gets in trouble for being wrong, stepping out of line or presenting information that contradicts a agreed upon course of action.  But it is clearly a lot harder than just letting people talk and engage.  There has to be a way to evaluate information. Someone might be 100% honest and open, but still lack the perspective to create accurate or useful knowledge.  On the other hand, the old saying applies that even a broken clock is right twice a day, so you have to listen to everybody. 

The Marines in Iraq had become a learning organization.  I wrote about it at this link. Parts of State Department have been learning organizations during some periods.  I have been involved in some. It was exciting but those flashes of lights tend to flicker out when personnel or priorities shift. 

Maybe both personnel and priorities have shifted concerning PRTs in Iraq.  Maybe its just me.  Maybe the State Department has moved along.  Maybe the old Arab proverb applies, "The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on. I don’t suppose my banana index translates very well anyway. It even stopped working in Iraq before I left. 

Posted by Broadnax at 12:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

We are starting to notice the remarkable, game changing development in energy. Scientists have discovered a new way to get natural gas out of shale. They call it hydraulic-fracturing. And there is a lot of potential. This new technique has increased American gas reserves by something like 39% in the last couple of years.   Experts estimate that we have as much usable gas in the U.S. as the Saudis have oil and if only half of our coal powered plants converted to cleaner burning natural gas we could easily reach our greenhouse gas reduction goals. 

Gas is cleaner than oil and much cleaner than coal, both in terms of actual pollution and in terms of greenhouse gases such as CO2.  Another important consideration is that WE have our own vast new supplies of gas.  Most exportable oil is under corrupt, unfriendly or unstable countries.  It is better not to send American money to some of these guys.  Our gas, on the other hand, is in peaceful, pleasant American places like Pennsylvania, New York, Maryland and West Virginia.  Many of these rural areas could use the jobs that domestic natural gas could bring.

I traveled though much of the area where the gas is when I drove from Syracuse to Virginia.  It is the same area where we did a lot of coal mining.  This is no coincidence.  The same forces that turned Paleozoic plants into coal also made gas.  The gas is trapped in shale formations and you can easily see how the roads were cut through the shale formations. 

But I noticed something else about the geography of natural gas. It is also the geography of the Chesapeake Bay watershed and much of the water that isn’t running off into the Chesapeake flows into the Great Lakes. We worry about these bodies of water. While listening to local radio driving near Wilkes-Barre, PA I heard reports of firms extracting gas were asking permission to discharge water into the local streams. The HYDRO part of hydraulic-fracturing has to go somewhere.  I don’t know the details of the process, nor do I know about the quality of the water discharge, but I do know that any discharge in large enough amounts is going to create disruptions in the local ecosystem, in this case the Chesapeake Bay watershed.  Some people are already raising concerns.  The process may turn out to be benign.  It could even be beneficial if the water is clean, but we will have to think of this as a balancing among priorities. 

Yesterday’s solutions are today’s problems and it follows that today’s solutions will be tomorrow’s problems.   Abundant American natural gas will help free us from nasty foreign oil suppliers and help us reach climate change goals, no doubt at the cost of something in the future.  This is not necessarily a failure of wisdom or judgment.   It is an ordinary consequence of making choices, setting priorities and doing these things in the context of imperfect information.   All these things are part of the definition of decision making.

Future critics with access to much more information as well as the experience of the past can easily attack earlier choices, but the comparison is usually unfair, as it is always unfair to compare hypothetical solutions with a real ones.  

For now the smart move looks like going for the gas. 

Posted by Broadnax at 10:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

It wasn’t the pleasant drive I envisioned.   It rained all the way up past Hersey PA.  Then it began to snow – snow in mid-October.  Where is this global warming stuff when you need it.   (Of course, I best be careful even joking about this subject.  The BBC is under vitriolic attack for pointing out that the globe has not gotten any warmer since 1998.  For the record, I have believed global warming is happening since around 1982.  I think I even pre-date Al Gore.   I believe some of it is influenced by humans and some of it is natural.   It probably can be managed through a combination of mitigation and adaption.  But I think the whole debate has become way too political and ideologically driven, so much so that I think truth takes a second place to politics, and when I hear that activists are trying squash information, I get annoyed.) 

Anyway, it cleared up a little by the time I got to New York.  It is pretty up here.  The leaves are in mid-turn.  They will peak soon.  If the predicted rain and snow doesn’t come, maybe I can enjoy them.

On the way up I stopped at Hersey PA.  You see above that even the streetlights are Hershey kisses on Chocolate Avenue.  Milton Hersey, who founded the chocolate company that bears his name, was a very kind and good man.  He used the profits from his firm to make life pleasant for people around him.  For example, he founded a school, supported hospitals and helped make Hersey PA a place where people want to live. I won’t write all the details.  Check out the article if you want to find out more.  Suffice to say that there are special places in heaven for people like Milton.  I bought and happily ate a Hersey bar in his honor today. Below is Hershey heaven (I guess). It is from a mural at "The Hershey Story" museum.

We took the kids up to Hershey about ten years ago to tour the plant.  I got new respect for Hershey after that.  There just are some firms that are better than others, usually showing the personality of a founder.   Marriott is also like that.  I always stay in Marriott when I can.   It just seems a generous, honest and family friendly company.   As long as I am endorsing good companies, I also admire Charles Schwab, Cabalas, USAA insurance & Samuel Adams beer.  I hesitate to add, because people will give me some crap about it, but I also like United Airlines.  They always treated me fairly, even if travel in general sucks.   I don’t know if being good adds to their bottom line.  I am a loyal customer of Charles Schwab, USAA, Cabalas and Marriott and I advise others to use their services, but they also happen to make things I like to use.  I don’t really like Sam Adams beer, so that doesn’t do them much practical good if I admire the company.  I have indeed specifically bought Hershey bars BECAUSE of the Milton Hershey legacy, but that doesn’t add up to much. 

Everything else being equal, I will buy something made in America and I give specific preference to products from Wisconsin or Virginia, but everything else rarely is equal.  I also understand that in this integrated world, the place of origin is hard to determine, but I never said it was logical.

On the left are products of Central New York, BTW. 

On the other hand, I won’t buy gas at CITGO – even if it is cheaper - because of Hugo Chavez.   I feel a little conflicted because I don’t want to hurt to good American station owners, but I cannot support that guy. Besides the other rotten things, he banned Coke Zero in Venezuela.  I refuse to go to any movie made by Michael Moore or Oliver Stone and I stopped enjoying Two and a Half Men after Charlie Sheen went nuts with the 9/11 conspiracy theories, but I think these are the only non-economic, non-taste factors that influence my purchasing decisions.  I suppose there are lots of unconscious associations.

Of course, we should make most of our product decisions based on the product itself.  It gets way to complicated to try to figure all the permutations of good and bad.  Few people are good enough in their own lives to judge the actions of firms.  Besides, in the real world "Corporate Responsibility" usually just means an opportunity for some activists to shake down a firm and firms often pay protection money to politically correct groups in the name of corporate responsibility.

Above is from a rest stop along I-81 a few miles outside Syracuse.  

"Corporate diplomacy can make a lasting impression.  I went to a Jim Beam tasting event six or seven years ago.  They told us about the lore of Bourbon, how it was invented in Kentucky, is aged in charred oak etc.  I didn't know that Bourbon cannot be aged more than around seven years, or it gets to be too strong.  Scotch keeps getting better for 18 years, but Bourbon ages faster in the warmer Kentucky climate.  BTW - Scotch older than 18 or Bourbon older than 7-8 is just a waste of money.  It gets older and more alcoholic; it just doesn't get any better.  After the "tasting," they offered various Bourbons for sale. I bought several bottles of more expensive whiskey than I would have purchased pre-tasting.  It doesn't take very much tasting to influence your judgment.  But I still feel more favorably disposed toward Jim Beam because of their outreach and I now believe I can tell the difference between black and white label, and between "Booker," "Baker," "Knob Creek," &  Basil Hayden. Notice, I say "I believe".  It helps if I can see the bottle first.

The guy at the tasting admitted that most people really cannot tell the difference all the time.  You would probably become a drunk before developing the true skill. Much indeed is in the presentation, but that makes sense. Most of the price you pay at a fine restaurant is in the surroundings and service and drinking the best whiskey from a dixie cup just doesn't cut it. 

Posted by Broadnax at 06:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Broadnax at 12:52 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The State Department blog featured an interesting discussion about discrimination against people with disabilities in the FS.  I won’t go into details.  Suffice to say the idea was that people who go to places like Afghanistan and Iraq derive career benefits and that the system is thus unfair since only the able-bodied can do these kinds of assignments. 

This takes the idea too far.  I agree that we should make reasonable accommodations to people with disabilities wherever we can, but there are some places where we can’t.  If we think a job is important enough to be done, we have to allow those who can do it to do it.

My job in Western Iraq was more vigorous than most others because we had to travel across the largest area of operations in Iraq.  I didn’t have to be in top-condition to do the job, but just humping onto a helicopter or into an MRAP with body armor and gear is hard.   The chow hall had a wide selection of food, but we were not always near the chow hall.  It gets pretty hot and dusty in the Iraqi desert.  It is indeed a physical challenge that not everyone can do.   It would be life-threatening to send anybody who couldn’t pull his own weight, for the individual as well has his colleagues.   This is just true.   

I would point out/admit that I have lost some of my ability over the years.   That is what happens as you get older.  Ability and disability are a continuum.    When it comes to running miles in less than six minutes, I have become disabled.   This gradient can be deceptive.   It is hard to identify the exact point where we are not in good enough condition for a particular task.   But that point is reached.  This is not like a made-for-TV movie or an after school special.   Sometimes it doesn’t matter how much you want something or how much you try.  

Nature, war and the laws of physics are not fair.   

So what about the compensation?   I suppose it depends on what you mean by fair.   FSOs are supposed to be worldwide available.   Not all of us are and we might lose our worldwide clearance.   But good health is a definite advantage.   I don’t know how we can get around that.   One reason I have been successful is that I don’t get sick very often.   You may not succeed even if you show up, but you certainly cannot succeed if you don’t, no matter whether the reason is good or bad.

We will all sooner or later become “disabled” if we live long enough and I suppose being dead, i.e. “vitality challenged” is a significant impediment to success, so that is all our fates.  Before that time, we can do our jobs and be productive members of society, and I guess that I think of work as more an obligation than a right.   It makes a lot of sense to help everybody be as productive as they can, but you cannot achieve total equality in results. 

I had great experience but I didn’t get promoted this year for my work in Iraq.  This is okay.  I agree that we don’t necessary deserve a career jump just for going to dangerous or unpleasant places.   And you don’t need to go to Iraq to find places like that.  Many Foreign Service posts are dangerous and unpleasant.  The ability and willingness to go to these places - and do a good job while there - is part of our job, part of our work ethic.  It is worth something.  It should be encouraged.  It deserves consideration and it should not be devalued.  It makes little sense to subtract one of the big virtues of the FS just because not everybody can achieve it. We need to be reasonable about these things.  

Henry Ford said that asking “’who ought to be boss’ is like asking ‘Who ought to be tenor in the quartet?’ Obviously, the man who can sing tenor."  This goes for most things.  Ability counts and talents & abilities are not evenly distributed.  This is the way it is, whether we like it or not. 

Posted by Broadnax at 10:30 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Measuring success in public affairs is hard because we don't control all, or even most of the key factors. Beyond that, we are essentially trying to measure a cascading set of conditional probabilities, each more fuzzy than the one before.  First we are trying to measure attitudes that nobody really understands.   Then we are asking where those attitudes come from.  After that we want to know the strength of the conviction and how attitude make practical differences.   Do they change behaviors or outcomes?    Complicating analysis is that effects may be significantly separated from the causes in both time and space and you have to account for the effects of temporary circumstances and random chance. 

You begin to see the problem?  All we really need to care about is what people do, but to explain that adequately, we have to consider all the things mentioned above.    

Does the Rooster Make the Sun Rise?

It only gets worse. Public affairs can be a little like peeing in the Pacific Ocean saying it caused the rising tide and practitioners, me included, can sometimes strut like roosters taking credit for the sunrise.  In other words, we are not sure how the attitudes affected behavior, nor are we sure where those attitudes came from or the strength of conviction.  On top of that we are trying to figure out how our small input created a big output.  

Not that we are always merely mendacious when taking credit, BTW.  Public affairs is indeed all about leverage.   Very small input can often create monumental outputs using leverage of the public affairs environment as it pulls in outside resources.   Even this good thing, however, is just another problem for measurement.  The equation would look like this. 

Our input + lots of other resources we don't control + luck + time = output, which MAY grow into a useful outgrowth.   We cannot control most of the factors in this equation and often cannot even know what they are, so instead we measure the reach (not the effectiveness) of OUR own inputs. Let me illustrate with one of my usual examples, not surprisingly an oak tree 

Mighty Oaks From Tiny Acorns Grow - But a Bushel of Acorns is Not an Oak Forest

If I plant an acorn, it may grow into a mighty oak.  How much credit do I deserve?  Maybe a squirrel would have planted an acorn if I didn’t.  Maybe one would just grow by itself.  Besides that,  I didn’t make the acorn.  I didn’t create the soil.   I cannot control the rain nor can I anticipate every destructive storm nor control all the bugs.  The oak tree will grow according to its form and DNA.   I cannot demand that it become a pine tree. In fact there is little I can do expect remove obstacles to it becoming the best it can be.   But if you come back 100 years later, maybe some kid will say, “My grandfather planted that tree.” 

In public affairs we are not dealing with acorns.  Our analogous measure is reach.   We can get a reasonably good measure of the number of people who COULD have received our message.   It doesn’t mean they DID receive our message or that they paid any attention.   So reach is a problematic measure. 

Don't Count the Same Guys too Many Times

A look at Facebook shows examples of opportunity, challenge & problems associated with this kind of measurement. You might have a thousand friends or a big rock star might have a million fans.  But how much are they getting the messages?  We also habitually overestimate the connections.  If you have 100 Facebook friends and each of them has 100 friends, you do not have 100 x 100 or 10,000 friends because the sets overlap.  If your friends are also each other's friends you may have only 100 in total. Overlap is usually not 100% and the real number is probably more than just 100, but it is far less than 10,000.   

Reach is not a very useful measure, but we like it because it is a relatively easy number to find or estimate AND it tends to be the largest number we are can get, especially if we engage in some willful ignorance about human attention spans and math 101 concepts of overlapping sets, as above.    

Reach Exceeds Grasp

And reach is relatively easy to astro-turf, especially in the new media.  There is an interesting article talking about how you can BUY Facebook friends and fans for as little as $.076 and $.085 respectively.  What reach!  If you have big bucks you can reach the all the world in theory.  Who can you blame if your reach exceeds your grasp, if you have a million fans who cannot remember your name or hear your message? 

Hey, the numbers are good, even if they probably overlap and may represent meaningless relationships.  We might become a little suspicious if our extrapolated fan bases (i.e. our estimate of our own fans to the exponent of their fans & friends) exceeded the total population of the earth, but achieving that might take a couple of months anyway.   

I am not saying we should not rejoice at successful numbers, but let's not try to fool others and let's not fool ourselves.  Reach provides ONLY the opportunity to engage and engagement provides only the opportunity to communicate and communication provides only to opportunity to make a difference.  You need to start with the acorns, but that doesn't mean you automatically have a grove of big oak trees.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

World War II began on this day seventy years ago when the Nazis invaded Poland.  The fate of Poland was actually set a few days before when Hitler and Stalin agreed to divide the country between them.  Communism and fascism are variations of the same totalitarian idea.  It really wasn’t as surprising that they could get together as it seemed at the time.  

But the roots of the war go back much deeper.  We can start with the Treaty of Versailles, which was really unworkable. But nothing is inevitable in history. Had the economies not stagnated and the depression not hit, maybe Germany could have worked out its problems.   

Another root of the war was Germany itself.   The constitution of the Wiemar Republic was a model of democracy in theory, but its proportional representation, among other things, made it unstable and allowed demagogues like Hitler to leverage power.

A world at war still was not inevitable. During the 1930s, craven politicians in the great democracies appeased Hitler.   They feared war so much that they made war more likely and made the devastation more terrible when it came.  The simple argument against appeasement is that you just cannot appease dictators.  They always demand more.  But there is a more deeper one that is implicit but sometimes overlooked.  Let’s use the Hitler example. 

He was “appeased” several times.  Each time it made him hungry for more AND gave him more power to demand more.   Germany could not have launched an aggressive war unless it secured its flanks.  Imagine if there had been no Anschluss with Austria. Could Hitler have counted on security there?  Or what is Czechoslovakia had remained intact?  Czechoslovakia had formidable industry and the Sudety Mountains provided defensible terrain. The great democracies just gave that away. First they gave away the mountains (the Sudetenland) in the ostensible name of minority rights.  Then they gave away the rest to buy peace.   In all these cases, Hitler not only eliminated a threat; he also absorbed the power and got stronger.

The Nazi Germany that launched the war in 1939 was a country on steroids.   It had gobbled up Austria and Czechoslovakia, secured Memel, rebuilt and remilitarized.

Critics say the democracies could not have gone to war with Germany earlier, but then they were forced to go to war with a more powerful Germany later, a Germany they had accepted and passively helped build.  Had they resisted earlier they would have faced a weaker Germany. Hitler might have backed down short of war and he might have fallen from power if prevented from expanding.  We judge the power muscular Germany of 1939 and forget that this monster was transformed from a weakling of only six years earlier with the collaboration of peace-loving leaders in the great democracies.   

History is the sum of choices.  It is not inevitable and it is not over.   We cannot do experiments.  We never know what would have happened in different situations.   Maybe if the British and French had acted early, maybe it would have meant war earlier, which they probably could have won easier, but then we would be talking about how their belligerence provoked a needless war of choice.  More likely,  their courage and resolve would have prevented or at least mitigated the conflict.

We Americans were largely out of the equation – by choice.  We thought we could just ignore the rest of the world and mind our own business.  We were not active appeasers, but we were certainly appeaser enablers. 

It has been seventy years since the war began and  sixty three years since it ended.  We like to gnash our teeth about how bad the world is today, but it is a lot better than it was back in 1939.  We have avoided another worldwide conflagration since that time. The depression did not return. The world became more prosperous, tolerant, democratic and connected.  

Maybe we did learn something from history and a post-war group of wise men build alliances like NATO and various institutions that preserved the peace, or at least prevented the big war, not through wishful thinking, such as espoused by the League of Nations, but through strength and sometimes blood.

The lesson that history teaches over and over is that peace does not preserve itself.   Peace is not the natural state of mankind and freedom has been rare thorough human history.   War cannot be banished from the earth.  It can be managed and controlled for long periods of time, but only if we recognize its reality and we are willing to pay the price.  Freedom can be enjoyed ultimately only by those strong and resolute enough to defend it. The price of liberty truly is eternal vigilance. This is not a pleasant thought, but it is one to keep in mind.

Other approaches are not as successful.  Experience shows that excessive search for peace ironically lead to war and those able to defend themselves often do not need to.  On July 24, 1929, the world outlawed war. This was the Kellogg-Briand Pact. It passed the U.S. Senate by a margin of 85-1. On September 30, 1938, Neville Chamberlain declared that the Munich Treaty with Hitler was "peace for our time."  Less than a year later ... well it didn’t work out the way they hoped. 

Posted by Broadnax at 05:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The guy sitting next to me from the Post Office told me that he was in process of renewing the fleet of delivery trucks.   They were thinking about alternative fuels and maybe electricity.  This is where government can foster some real progress, by both leading by example and breaking a path for others to follow. 

Below is a marketplace at Clarendon Metro.  I got a flat tire on my way to work, so I locked up the bike and hopped on the Metro to get to work. This was in operation when I went to pick it up.  People were selling vegetables, bread & honey.

A problem with translating small time innovation to big time application is usually a kind of chicken and egg dilemma.   For example, you cannot deploy alternative fuel vehicles unless you have a network of alternative fuel stations to service them.   On the other hand, you don’t want to build a network of alternative fuel stations until there are enough vehicles to justify the expense of building them.   The government is big enough to do both at the same time.

This is the kind of infrastructure path breaking government should do.   It is always hard to be the first down the path.   After that it can be easy for others to follow.   Unfortunately, this is not a very interesting thing for politicians.   The path breaking function is just a slog and once it’s done everybody thinks it would have happened anyway.   The bureaucrat who authorized the spending looks like he wasted the government’s money, since he pays the money and those who follow ride almost for free.  Worse yet, it is hard for politicians to target the benefits to their own constituents or contributors.   Yet some still make the hard and right decision and they should be praised. 

One thing that might help is looking at the whole value chain and considering the longer term.   I wrote a post about the ecological value chain and there is a similar calculation possible for any sort of investment.   You learn in business 101 about break even analysis.   That just shows how much must be sold or how long it will take for an investment to pay off.   In a simple example, you might pay an extra $100 for a boiler that pays off in energy savings in two years.   It makes a lot of sense to think ahead and pay a little more now to get a bigger payoff later, but the future is always uncertain and our government budgets tend to be short term.  

 It takes a wise and unselfish manager to pay more today out of his budget for something that will pay off a little at a time for his successors.   Making the value chain more apparent helps it become more a part of decision making.   Managers need to think of things like energy usage more like long term investments that pay dividends rather than just overhead. 

I learned and thought about these things during a breakfast on “green government” sponsored by “Government Executive” magazine.    You learn a lot when you go to these things, not only from the speakers but also from the people you sit next to.   And you get to eat breakfast too.  Sweet.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:43 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

As long I am wallowing in doubt and indecision, I have a few more thoughts about work, making a contribution and retirement. 

I could retire today… in theory.  FS is like the military in that respect.  We can get our full pensions after 20 years if we are at least fifty years old.  I have achieved both.  We have an up-or –out system.   Had I not been promoted in 2007, and presuming no promotions in 2008 or 2009, they would be kicking me out come this October.  As it is now, I can stay until February 2016.  My last promotion bought me six years and they gave me an extra year as compensation for my year in Iraq.

We are only allowed to stay in each pay-grade-class a certain number of years and we only get 27 years to jump into the Senior Foreign Service.  The grim reaper is always taking the hindmost.    The system, IMO, has a major flaw in that it puts faster risers at greater risk, since they come sooner up against their time in class.   We also have an interesting concept of “opening your window.”  You cannot be promoted into senior FS unless you open your window.  When you do that, it starts a clock ticking.  You get six evaluations and if you don’t make it to SFS by the time the clock runs out, your window shuts and you are involuntarily retired.    Your life can be extended if you go to a place like Iraq or have a year of training (as I did at Fletcher School, which is why I would have gotten the boot in 2009 instead of 2008).  A cautious person would wait until he had been in the FS for 21 years.  That would mean that he would lose nothing if he did not get promoted, since he would get kicked out of the FS in general in 27 years.   Of course, anybody who does that is probably not very ambitious. 

I opened my window as soon as I was eligible.   I didn’t want to hang around like a fart in a phone booth.   I could have survived as an FS01 until 2012, so that would have been only a four year difference (w/o the long term training year).  On the other hand, they could promote me and I would have more options.  I honestly didn’t think I would make it.  The odds are against you.  I knew that I should not hang around too long, but I also knew I would not have the courage to just set out w/o the boot.  So it was a kind of play or trade option. Get up or get out.

There is a kind of FS life-cycle and I fell into it for awhile.  When we are around forty-five, we complain about the lack of recognition and start bragging that we will be out the door the minute we become eligible for retirement, presumably earning the big bucks in the private sector. When we turn forty-nine, we go silent.  We stop talking about retirement in general and start to count the years until our time in the FS runs out.  A couple years later, we start complaining again, but this time it is decry the injustice that a “good worker like me” may be forced out while “I still have so much to contribute.” 

My question is about how much I still have to contribute.   As I wrote a few days ago, I am concerned that some of the new media is passing me by.  A lot of my skills have become obsolete.    Of course, I can learn new ones, but is it really a good deal to taxpayers for somebody like me to retrain to learn something that a lower-paid newer employee can just do out of habits learned as a child growing up with computers?  

It is always a dilemma to weigh experience and judgment against raw talent and brain-power.    Experience improves judgment, but only within a range of similar situations.  In times of rapid or discontinuous change, experience with former systems may be as much as an impediment as an advantage.   Old generals know how to fight the old wars.  They always are in danger of being overtaken by a revolution in military affairs.  The tank means changed tactics. The same goes for all walks of life, if somewhat less dramatically. That is why you have to clear out experience sometimes and let younger people in.  The experience of the past hangs on their necks less heavily or not at all.   Our up-or-out system is supposed to guard against this sort of complacency, but eventually you get to the end of the trail and maybe you get to the end of your own trail before they vote you off the island.

This is not a problem limited to the FS. In fact, we are relatively better off than many others precisely because of our up-or-out system.  The economic downturn has changed the equations.   All over the country people are delaying retirement. This is good in that it saves money on pensions and keeps people productive.   But it also clogs the arteries of an organization.   You need people leaving at the top in order to give people on other rungs of the ladder the opportunity to climb.

IMO, older people should keep working as long as they want to and as long as they can.  In fact, given the upcoming Social Security and entitlement crisis many will have to do just that, like it or not,  but maybe not in the same jobs or even the same professions.  You get stale after a while, as the pathways your good ideas and sound practices have blazed become ruts and craters that limit options for yourself and others. 

My baby boom generation is the biggest, healthiest and best educated cohort of soon-to-be senior citizens in the history of the world.  We see old people running marathons, discovering new things and opening new businesses.   We still have a lot to contribute and a duty not to sponge off the smaller generations that follow us.  I think we will see an amazing flowering of entrepreneurship among older people.    The Internet will greatly facilitate this trend.  

But maybe we need to be bumped out of our ruts. Our experience is valuable to the extent that it does something valuable.   It is a tool and like any tool, it must be used. It does not entitle us to anything, any more than the ownership of a hammer entitles you to pound.

I don’t know where I am going with this.   It is the time again for me to look for a new assignment and so the thoughts like this are clogging my brain. I have options where I can use my experience in new ways.  But I am not sure what to do.   Should I go down a path where I can use the skills I have developed, where I am reasonably sure of success, or try to cut a new one? 

Posted by Broadnax at 09:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I admit that I have a pretty sweet deal.  I like most of the things I do at work.  In fact, I would pay to go to many of the meetings and conferences they pay me to attend.  I am not saying it is all great, but the good things far outweigh the negatives.   I think about my job a lot, but that is hard to place in the “work” category, since if I didn’t have this job I would probably be studying many of the same things re new media, persuasion and knowledge management. 

I purport to put in long hours. I rarely get home before 7 or 8 pm, which means that I spend around 10 hours at work, but what is work?  And I can usually carve out time during the day for exercise etc.  I have only recently come to terms with this.  I used to feel guilty and lazy.  I couldn’t understand how I could be doing okay w/o working very hard. But after almost than twenty-five years of decent progress, I had to rethink this. Something seemed to be working.

Most people think or at least say that they are busy.   Much of this is self inflicted work.   Every day I see people doing things that need not be done or doing things in such a way that they actually create more work for themselves and others.   But the biggest reason people think they are busy is that they are fooling themselves. 

WSJ had an article about that, giving some scientific backing to my observation.   When people are asked how much they work, they invariably come up with significant higher hours than when they follow it closely with a dairy.   Some of this comes from the definition of work, as I mentioned above.   I read the WSJ, Economist and many other such publications.  I could not do my job if I didn’t keep up with the latest news and innovations.  But what % of that can I call work?  Most our high estimates of work hours comes from giving ourselves the benefit of the doubt. We might think that we usually work ten hour days and count the times when we work less as unusual exceptions.    But maybe there are more “exceptional” than “normal” days.

We have to remember that “normal” doesn’t mean typical or average.   It means the way something would be under good conditions.   A normal man would be healthy, not overweight and not deformed in any significant way.  This is not a typical or average man.   (BTW – an “average” man has less than two legs.  Think about it.  Nobody has more than two legs and some people have less, so the average is less than two.  Statistics can be interesting.)  IN that respect a normal day might be one where you worked through the day w/o important interruptions arriving and leaving on time.  There are not many normal days.

In respect to work, you have to consider both typical and normal. My first job in the FS was as public affairs officer in Porto Alegre. I was ambitious and worked hard, but I was distressed when I talked to colleagues who seemed a lot smarter and harder working.   My results were usually better than typical, but never up to what I considered normal. Life was too easy and I was sure I was just not doing something everybody else was doing.  I worried about this through my next posts, until I figured out that most people just think they are busier than they are and all the talk about constant work is just people talking. Pointing this out to people does not make me universally popular and I have to qualify the statement.  There are some times when you are truly busy, but most of the time not. Beyond that, if you are consistently working more than nine hours a day, and I am not talking about just being there but really working, you are burning out.  It is like trying to sprint through a Marathon. The results matter and sometimes LESS “work” will produce better results. 

I am not making a plea for indolence but I am very suspicious of people who claim to work 70 hour weeks all the time. I think there is a lot of useless energy spent and probably a lot less time on task than they say and probably than they think.

There is some virtue in doing less, especially if you find the points of maximum leverage and then use them. It is often better to clear obstacles than to push harder.   All good leaders should be a little lazy, create the proper conditions for the success of others and then get out of the way.   People need to be free to innovate and do things their way.  Constant hectoring will just give you a sore throat, make everybody less productive and create a lot of work for everybody.

Anyway, I put my time in at work and try to earn my salary, but I know that sometimes it is best to do less but do the right thing.

This story is tangential but it applies.  This guy has a clogged pipe. He called the plumber who says that he can fix the problem, but it will cost fifty dollars.  The guy agrees.   The plumber takes out a little hammer, walks to a place along the pipes and taps it a couple of times.    Everything is fixed.   The guy is outraged.  “Fifty dollars,” he says, “for a few taps?  I want an itemized bill.”   The plumber writes out a receipt.   “Tapping the pipe - $.05.  Knowing how and where to tap - $49.95.”

Posted by Broadnax at 11:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

It is starting to look like the dot.com bubble.   Nobody has really figured out how to monetize Web 2.0 and most of the current value of Web 2.0 companies comes from expectation of future value.  There is great excitement about building online communities, but it is hard to get these communities to do very much except be communities.   There is no doubt Web 2.0 has already changed how people communicate and how they do business.  But how can we really use it?

There was a South Park episode last year where one of the kids became an internet sensation in hopes of making a pile of money.   When he went to collect, he was told that his great fame had indeed earned him millions of internet bucks, but that they were not exchangeable into real money.    In PD 2.0 we are not trying to earn money, but we are trying to achieve sustained changes in attitudes and behavior in fields important to U.S. policies.   What if we reach millions of people only to find that our internet influence is not exchangeable into anything that matters to us?

What about the holy grail of Web 2.0, going viral?  Some top viral videos are at this link. Many of the things that go viral are just silly, like a cat flushing a toilet.   But I question the effectiveness even of the serious contenders.   It is great to get exposure, but what is it good for?   I remember a study of the "Clio Awards."   Those were the academy awards of commercials, where the funniest and most artistic commercials were chosen by the cognoscenti of commercials.    The problem was that the winners were not particularly good at selling the products they represented.   In fact, they were below average.    People often loved the commercial, but didn't care about the product and sometimes they couldn't even tell what product was being advertised.   Many of the viral videos are like the Clio award winners that get lots of attention and even critical acclaim, but don't do the job.

There is also no reliable way to predict if something will go viral. Studying successful viral videos is not much use.    We can identify - in retrospect - what they did right, but when we compare this to the millions of others that didn't make it, we find that they also did many of the same things.   It is a type of survivor bias, like attributing special skills to the winner of a very long and multi-round game of Russian roulette.   The guy would probably write a book.  He and all of us would think that his astonishing success must be due to something other than random chance, but we would all be wrong and we should not be enticed into the playing the game with his "proven" method.

The lesson is NOT that we stop exploring new media.  Rather it is that we should not fall in love with it or with any particular aspect, platform or technology.   It is easy to be beguiled by large numbers and exponential growth rates but we should be persistent in questioning HOW we can use it in PD.   Some things will be very useful, but maybe not always or everywhere and others might just be exciting w/o payback.   It is good to think about the differences.

Remember pets.com during the dot.com bubble with that sock puppet?  Everybody loved the marketing.   They even bought a super bowl add featuring the sock puppet.  They were defunct less than a year later.  I could never figure out how most of those companies could make any money; after a while, neither could anybody else.

Posted by Broadnax at 02:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Colonel Patrick Malay, my friend and colleague from Iraq, is coming to Washington and together we will make a presentation at the Strategic Communication Network (formerly known as Fusion Team) on May 29 about the importance of strategic communication in Iraq and how the Marines and the ePRT worked with the people and leaders of Anbar to help create stability and relative prosperity.  Below is more or less what I plan to say.

Every move you make conveys a message and actions often speak louder than words.   This is especially important in a disrupted and dangerous place like Anbar province was in 2007-8.   But the words and how you express them are also important.   You need a combination of talking and doing and that is what we were lucky enough to have in Western Anbar when the Marines, the State Department and other parts of the USG worked productively with the Iraqis to make the place safer and more prosperous.

I thought and wrote a lot about it at the time and I recommend you look at my webpage from the time.   The passage of time has strengthened my conviction that we achieved something special.   But I don’t think it was something unique and I do believe that the lessons of Western Anbar have meaning in other places and times. 

As with many successes and most failures, it seems easier to see the causes when you look back than it was at the time of the events.   We had a fortunate combination of factors.  None of them alone would have been sufficient to achieve success, but each of them was necessary.  

The most obvious is that the people turned against the insurgents and the Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). The insurgents and AQl, it turned out, really were bad.  When their promises were replaced by the reality of murder, mutilation, rape & destruction, the people of Anbar realized that letting them get established had been a mistake.  Unfortunately, standing up to the terrorists was dangerous and often fatal, not only for the brave individuals involved, but also for their family and friends. Early opposition ended up headless in roadside ditches.  AQI would often even go after anybody who tried to remove the bodies. This was an example of AQI’s strategic communication. A headless body makes one hell of an impression, especially if you think you might be next. 

Terrorism indeed created terror that paralyzed opposition.  So the second part of the puzzle was needed – the surge.

The surge was more than just an increase in coalition troop numbers.   It also coincided with a change in strategy.   In Anbar, it meant that Marines protected the people locally and went to live in Iraqi communities among the people they were supposed to protect.  They trained police & security forces and held the ground, but their most important strategic communication message was just being there.    For civilian populations in war zones, the perception of safety is crucial.  The perception of safety creates real safety as more people go onto the streets, interact with each other and begin to get the confidence to stand up to the bad guys or at least help others do so.

The supporting strategic communication message the Marines sent was consistency.    The people needed to know that the Marines would be there for a long time. If the population suspects that coalition forces will leave and the bad guys will be able to return to chopping heads, nobody will cooperate.  The only way you can create the perception that you are there for a long time is to be there for a long time and have the reputation for keeping your word.  Marines stayed and established a reputation for honesty and persistence.  

So we have two necessary parts of the puzzle.   The people have turned against AQI and the greater numbers of coalition forces are making it to be both openly against the terrorists and alive at the same time.  Both these things are necessary and probably in that order. But we still need something more.  

Although basic stability always precedes prosperity, stability cannot be long maintained if the people are miserable and have no meaningful economic activity. Stability and prosperity are symbiotic and mutually reinforcing.  This is where our ePRT came in.  A PRT certainly cannot create prosperity, but we could help create conditions where the Iraqis could build, or rebuild, their own prosperous community.   

We did this by emphasizing the structure of a civil society. These are the things that are so ubiquitous in our own society that we rarely even notice them anymore, things like a functioning court system, protections for private property, transportation, clean water, distribution of goods and a reasonable functioning financial system.

Let me say again that we did not, we could not, create this kind of thing.   We could, however, help the Iraqis do it for themselves.   We could and did make grants of money.  We sponsored training.   We (and even more the military) physically built things like schools, roads and bridges, but I content that the thing that made all these activities into a successful whole was strategic communications.   There is really not much we did for the Iraqis that they could not have done for themselves.  But the fact that we were out there encouraged them and paved the way for progress.

It is Better to Light a Single Candle than to Curse the Darkness

Let me give one example.  It is not the most important example, but it is the one I like the best.   I called it the “String or Emeralds”.  You can see more about it at the String of Emeralds Link.

Iraq is an arid country, plagued by dust storms and drought. But the dust storms and drought are not completely natural.   Some is caused by humans and livestock destroying the natural vegetation cover by bad farming methods and overgrazing.   This has been a problem for 4000 years and our PRT could not solve it.    But after 4000 years, we have learned something about soils.   Our PRT’s agricultural attaché was an expert on rehabilitating irrigated dry soils damaged by salinization (salts deposit is a big problem in dry Iraq). We also took the lessons from our own dust bowl of the 1930s.  Planting trees serves to slow the wind and catch some of the blowing dirt.   I looked for opportunities to help and I found some.  The Iraqis understood the need for this too, but the effort had been neglected under Saddam Hussein and collapsed utterly during the war. 

We went to some of the oases and raised the profile and that encouraged the Iraqis to think more about it too.    The strategic communications lesson is that when someone in authority just shows interest, things can happen. There is no real magic to it. It just takes effort. The trees will grow and the future will be better than the past.

This is my Western Anbar progress report from about the time I left. You can get a better idea if you look at the sections.

When does strategic communication work?  The short answer is when it is embedded in other things that are working. All the talking in the world could not have made Western Anbar safe if not for the Marines & our brave Iraqi friends.   But communications enhanced and spread the good news.  And by spreading it and making it believable the perception of security started to become more real.   Telling the right stories creates a reinforcing loop, a virtuous circle or just plain success.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I have been talking to leaders of technology firms in Brazil and it has been very interesting.  While it is not appropriate to post details, some of the general thoughts are applicable across a wide spectrum of endeavors and I will share them here.

One of the problems I have wrestled with has to do with the nature of knowledge and how to pass it within groups and organizations.   I find that this is a common problem and nobody seems to have developed a really robust solution.   I don’t think there is one; at least we cannot create a system that will take care of it.   Knowledge cannot be separated from its human carriers.  We like to use the term “viral” and it really fits here.  Passing knowledge just takes commitment and work by smart people.  Too often, organizations try to outsource their brains by giving the job of thinking and analyzing to consultants or computers.  Well, the buck stops with the decision maker.  He/she certainly doesn’t need to be an expert on all things.  Those consultants and computers can help inform decisions, but they cannot make them.   I was thinking about these things during our discussions.

Let me start by making a distinction between information and knowledge.  The two are synonyms and often used interchangeable, but in the deeper meaning information is the raw material that becomes knowledge when it is when it is understood and integrated into thinking.

Many management challenges are common to both public and private business and one of the most persistent is the difficulty of passing reliable knowledge and experience within an organization.  One of the most confusing circumstances is when information passes w/o the knowledge to make it meaningful or put it in proper context.   It is confusing because the recipients of the information may not perceive the problem.   They may feel satisfied that they are “informed” but remain misled. 

This is an age old problem.  As any organization grows beyond the size where frequent face-to-face contacts are common and easy, information sharing and knowledge production become an acute challenge.  It is especially true today in the fast changing and multifaceted environment created by the new media.  Information is held by specific individuals who may have very deep knowledge in a particular specialty, but not know how it fits into the bigger picture and may be unaware of the significance of what they know in other contexts.   In an information rich environment, the problem is how to arrange it to make it useful and how to tap into tacit knowledge that people may possess but be unable to properly express.  A learning organization is one where the total knowledge and expertise available to the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.   This condition is easier to aspire than achieve. 

Technology provides some help.  One way to address the challenge is through a wiki where everyone can contribute as well as see, consider and enhance what others have contributed.   In theory, a wiki can tap into the wisdom of the group.   It can be made available only to particular groups, to the entire organization or even to a more general public.   A larger group will create greater management problems, but will likely tap into a more diverse set of talent and knowledge.   Remember that no matter how good you and your colleagues are, the smartest people on any particular subject probably don’t work for you.  Your decisions will be better if you can think of a way to bring them in.

The amount of openness is a management decision.   However management cannot really decide if individuals in the organization will enthusiastically contribute.   Enthusiasm cannot be mandated, but it can be incentivized and those incentives must come from a true commitment at the top.   Good contributions must be recognized and the inevitable good-faith errors must be corrected but not punished.  

The new media allows and requires many choices.  The mix of tools changes depending on the situation and they change over time.  Yesterday’s solution is often today’s problem, but that does not necessarily imply that any mistakes were made.   Employees have to be confident that their good solutions that solve today’s problems will not be held against them when the situation changes tomorrow.  It takes a long time to build the kind of trust that lets people stick their necks out and months or years of work can be dissipated by one serious breach.  Leadership cannot indulge its emotions or look for people to blame when sound decisions are overtaken by events.  These are pernicious breaches of trust.

Another important aspect of knowledge sharing is to have the knowledge available to share in the first place.  Diverse and dispersed world-wide organizations tend to have information but it is often not translated into useful knowledge.  One tech fix is to make everything is available online in “the cloud.”  Groups working on particular tasks may not be near each other geographically or even in the same time zones, but they can be virtually side by side.  We have talked about this for many years, but technology has only recently made it practical, since real collaboration requires good connections and a lot of bandwidth.  

We have a great opportunity.  There is a lot of low hanging fruit and that we should take advantage of new technologies and interested participants right away.   Opportunities are out there.  It is there for us.  The most important obstacle is our own inability to take them and make them work.  We have to work to create learning organizations.  It is a steep hill to climb, but not beyond our ability.

Evaluate AND Take Action

They also emphasized the need to evaluate AND prune dead wood.  Sections are evaluated every six months to see what is working and what is not.   An organization in this competitive world cannot allow itself to hold on to programs and platforms that are not performing, no matter how many people work there or love them.   The less performing sections are cannibalized to support the ones that are doing better. 

Posted by Broadnax at 10:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Posted by Broadnax at 08:56 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Continuing my thoughts on games in public affairs, interactive games will soon become the leading method of persuasion and a key advertising medium.   I know that is a sweeping statement.   Those familiar only with the “Space Invaders” game generation will think I am nuts.  The “Myst” people will see the merit in the statement, and those playing World of Warcraft would heartily endorse it, if they could divert their attention long enough from their games.   Games are already a primary way that young people interact with data, each-other and the world in general.   Even the EU now thinks that gaming might be good for young minds, so we better get used to the idea that games.  For a funnier approach, take a look at this video.

Games’ pervasive persuasive ability is part of a continuum of imagined worlds so let’s digress a little to the more familiar previous persuasion champion – the play (or in the modern versions the movie or TV show).  Sophocles and Shakespeare, Ibsen, Shaw, O’Neil and George Lucas & Steven Spielberg were/are masters of persuasion and they all knew what they were doing.   Think of a play as a very long commercial message that you volunteer to watch.  And remember that if a thirty-second commercial can sell you a product, don’t you think an hour and thirty minute play or a thirty minute TV show can sell you an idea or a lifestyle.

The writers, producers, directors and actors work together to sell you an idea.  Sometimes it is  innocuous; sometimes not.  Shakespeare sold us all the Tudor version of English history and we bought that Richard III was nothing but a sneaky rat and Henry V was a great and brave hero.  There is some truth to some of these characterizations, but they are fictional caricatures, not history.  It was a conscious effort at propaganda, but it was so skillfully done that it is still part of the fabric of our society four centuries later.   A skillful current propagandist is Oliver Stone.   Many people draw their knowledge of JFK or Nixon from his movies and the images are strong.  Even when you know the real history of the events, it is hard to get the image out of your mind.   The living, moving image often trumps the truth of history.   That is the power of the play/movie/TV Show.    

The writers/producers/directors control ALL the characters.   They can make the ones they don’t like unlikable or stupid.  It is all a set up.  They can structure events so that faults are revealed AND they can give characters the faults to be revealed.    It is analogous to your own dream, where all the characters are you but they seem to be others and that is how you react.   In every play, for persuasion purposes, the bad guys and the good guys are on the same side.  They are all working for the guy who wrote the play.  But the illusion remains.    Directors sometimes disingenuously talk about characters as independent or they ridicule critics by pointing out that it is only fiction.   Think of how you view familiar historical people or events.  Now consider whether your image came from reading actual history or just watching it on TV.   

BTW – the power of the producer has increased in Orwellian fashion.  Now many directors go back to their movies and change them to fit the current situation and sensibilities.   The “Star Wars” you saw in 1979 is not the same one you will see today.  “He who controls the past controls the future and he who controls the present controls the past,” is the philosophy of Ingsoc and Big Brother in George Orwell’s “1984.”

But the power of the play/movie/TV show pales in comparison to a modern game.  Viewer might get involved in a drama, but not matter how involved the couch potato gets, he is still a passive participant.   None of his intelligence or perception will change the course of the investigation on “Law & Order”  and none of his passionate tears will prevent one death on “House” or “ER” and the rerun will unfold exactly as it did the first time.

Not so in a game.   The game provides some choices and the illusion of free will.   What you do makes a difference to the outcome.   That is why games are so addictive.   You get to be a player in all the senses of that word.    The irony is that BECAUSE you are making choices and seeming to go your own way, the power of persuasion is multiplied.  

The game maker sets all the parameters.   He can suspend the universal laws of physics.  He can dictate the nature of human interactions.   He can dictate the nature of human nature itself.  Animals can become wise; inanimate object can be animated.   The game maker can determine heroes and villains, but now they are also YOUR friends and enemies.    Humans have a wonderful capacity to personify animals and objects.   It is much easier when these things have elements of a real personality.    Games create that.

I don’t think most game makers have an explicit social or political agenda, but they do have perceptions and prejudices that color their view of reality and so come to color the reality of many others. 

I no longer play many video games and I date myself when I say that used to play Sid Meyer’s Civilization, a game from the 1990s.   It is the only game that I really know well and it is familiar enough to many people, so let me use one example from that game.  You can find examples from other games at this link.

Civilization requires you to develop from a society of Stone Age wanders into a future with space travel.  As you develop various technologies, you get more options, both in civil and military matters.   The game makers have determined the relative merits of particular advances and you get them as givens. You compete with other civilizations and you have to spend a lot of time defending yourself and there was some criticism that the game was too warlike, but so was human history.

The first rendition of the game the other civilizations had characteristics broadly correlated to their historical activities.    For example, Hammurabi and the Babylonians were builders who spent relatively more time developing irrigation and road.  Lincoln and the Americans were technologically savvy and likely to develop democracy.   Shaka and the Zulus were less interested in technology and were more aggressive in attacking others.   The most aggressive and dangerous people on the board were Genghis Khan and the Mongols.   This was very un-pc and it disappeared from subsequent versions of the game.   

So the message of the later versions was that the unpopular idea of national character or any sort of cultural determinism was completely useless.   This is a very important point, BTW.   IF applied to the real world, it would mean that over time you would expect the Swiss and the North Koreans to behave in the same ways and that their national character would have no predictive value.   This, BTW, is the message of cultural relativism that you get in many universities.    If you get it directly, you can counter with the Swiss-North Korean argument.   If you imbibe it unconsciously as a teenager, it just becomes part of your world view.

But there is even a deeper message implicit in the game.  You, as the leader of your civilization, have nearly complete knowledge.  You make choices based on calculation or preference, but you can be logical.   Real world leaders never have this option.   There is always fog and uncertainty.   So if players take a lesson from the game, they have way too much confidence in the ability of leaders to run the economy or engage in foreign policy.   Conversely, if the leader does not deliver as promised, they are less likely to understand the constraints, unavoidable ignorance or mitigating circumstances.

Anyway, more and more we will use games to persuade and train.   Games are artificial models, created by humans, bundled with their unconscious preconceptions and prejudices and often peppered with deliberate manipulation.  As with any model, they represent one reality.  They are not THE reality.  But they sure seem like it to the players and I wonder what sorts of mind-sets the games are creating.   Games can create an entirely artificial world, whose characteristics players may carry over to the real world they (sometimes) live in.

Posted by Broadnax at 09:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Below is Smokey the Bear, no doubt reading plainly written government regulations.

The Congress in its wisdom has mandated that Federal employees should write in plain language. This is a great idea, but what does it mean?

I write in a simple way.  I don’t use the passive voice very much.  Most of my sentences are simple noun, verb & object.   I don’t use circumlocutions, but I do use the most appropriate word, for example, “circumlocutions”.   Using that one word avoids having to write two or more sentences.  

Plain writing requires a wide vocabulary. You have to use the words appropriate to the ideas you are trying to express.  Speaking of writing plainly does not mean making it so easy that a fifth-grader can understand.  Some concepts are beyond the understanding of a fifth-grader.     We have education to improve people so that they can indeed understand more.

Lord knows that government writing can be convoluted and confusing.  (Note the use of the word “convoluted”.  That is the best word for this thought.  An easier synonym for convoluted is difficult, but that does not adequately convey my meaning.)  I guess I am afraid that this great idea will be misused by some in the government to dumb-down our writing.    Some overzealous official might strip out words like “circumlocutions”, “convoluted” and … “overzealous”.   That would make my writing more simple-minded, but not simpler and not easier to understand.

There is no small irony in assigning a bureaucratic process to the art of writing.  Bureaucracy is the biggest reason our writing is difficult to understand (note that I did not use the word “opaque”, which was my first thought.  Instead I had to use three words (“difficult to understand”) that do not exactly convey the meaning I had in mind.    Much is lost when writing becomes a lowest common denominator group exercise.  The first goal of bureaucratic language is not to offend anybody, BTW. Conveying meaning is always a subordinated goal.

When I was in Poland, one of my Polish staff wrote a note asking for office supplies.   It was very clear, but also very clearly written by someone whose native language was not English.  The person receiving the request sent it back to me with a snarky comment “Didn’t you edit this.”   I wrote back much more politely, “No, I did not edit it.   I understood what she wanted and so do you.  Just send us the requested supplies and don’t bother me again.”  This was very clear and it caused some consternation among the admin folks.  My boss even called me to caution me about hostility, but they never bothered us again and it was worth it.   Had I knuckled under, I would have empowered the pedants and all of us would have spent many hours rewriting great prose like “Please send five boxes of pencils.” 

Government employees spend an inordinate amount of time on these sorts of things. Life is a lot easier if you just say no.  

And, BTW, the legislation specifically does NOT apply to regulations.  They can remain as opaque as ever, so that ordinary educated people cannot figure them out with any certainty.  I think we call that the "lawyer and bureaucrat full employment act."

Posted by Broadnax at 06:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

At work we are experimenting with using games in public affairs, so I have been thinking about them and reading about them.   I just got a book called Changing the Game, re how video games change ways we do business.   We are very much influenced by games because games create reality.   I plan to write a couple posts on this general subject, but to get my thoughts rolling I considered Monopoly.

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Left is the Polish version of Monopoly.  I didn't have the original American version, but I used the familiar names of properties in my post.  The proliferation of Monopoly around the world shows its general appeal.

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Monopoly was the game we played when I was a kid.  I played it with my sister and with my friends.   I didn’t realize what it was teaching me and the subtle persuasion that was going on.   Learning and persuasion are closely related, of course.   When we learn a system, we are simultaneously persuaded that it is good and/or useful.   So what does Monopoly teach/persuade? 

You learn a lot about statistics.   Dice produce random results within a pattern.   There are thirty-six possible combinations of two dice that produce the twelve numbers we might throw.  Seven is the most common number, since you can get seven with six different combinations of the two dice.   Least common are two and twelve, since there is only one combination that can produce each of these.

The Monopoly board accounts for this.    You cannot buy a property that is seven steps from “GO” and the most common landing spaces are occupied by “Chance,” or “Community Chest.”  The probabilities created by the dice would become less important as the game progressed, except various events of the game tend to bring you back to certain places.  You often are told to “advance to GO”, which resets the probabilities.  Seven spaces from “GO” is “Chance,“ BTW.   You are also frequently told to “Advance to the nearest RR” or sent to jail.   Seven spaces from Jail is “Community Chest” and there are no monopoly property possible seven paces from a RR except the green property North Carolina.  

Given all the permutations, it is generally the lower cost-lower rent properties that get most of the business.   Mediterranean and Baltic are the most visited properties, but it is hardly worth having them, even with a hotel.   Boardwalk is the killer property, but people tend not to land there and it costs a lot to build houses and hotels.   IMO the best combination of affordability, frequency and income are the Red group of Illinois, Kentucky and Indiana.   The next best are the Orange New York group.    I am sure that somebody has figured out exact probabilities. 

The winning strategy is to get the best property you can and build as soon as possible.    There is a big advantage to being first since you will get the resources to expand (and deprive your opponents of same). 

Fortune favors the bold and a person who is timid and refused to deploy his current money to produce future income cannot win.  Of course, the reverse is not necessarily true.  You can know all the things you should know and play superbly and still lose.  If you could just do something with a certain guarentee of success, it wouldn't be a game anybody would play.  There is no uncertainty in dice, but there is probability and risk. In Monopoly, you can assess risk.  Over the long term you will win if you do the right thing.  Over the short term, such as a particular game or even lifetime there is no such guarantee.  That is the nature of risk.

These are really good life lessons.  I learned probability from Monopoly before I knew about it in school.   We practiced simple math.  Got a good short course in negotiations and a chance to observe human nature in wealth and poverty.  

The world view we got from Monopoly was that this is the way life was.   We had early free enterprise, followed by consolidation and then Monopoly and bankruptcy for all but one big winner.   Although that last part was never achieved in our games, which was another lesson.   We always made deals (not permitted by the official rules) to help each other save face.   We also noticed that the bankers tended to have more ready cash than their property holdings seemed to justify.

The games usually ended when it became clear enough who was winning and everybody got bored, or else somebody got mad enough to upset the board or end the game abruptly.   We had several sets of brothers who played with us.  Inevitably one or more would resort to petty violence in response setbacks in the market, thereby ending the game.    I guess it was like real life.

Clearly, the game persuades us that some behaviors are useful and others not.   I don’t think Parker Brothers had support for Capitalism in mind when they started to sell the game in the 1930s.  In fact, I read that the precursor to Monopoly was invented by a socialist who wanted to show the pernicious nature of private ownership.   It just goes to show the law of unintended consequences that it taught generation of American kids about the virtues, if risky ones, of the free market. The mistake that Monopoly teaches is that the free market is a zero sum game, with winners in proportion to losers.  In fact, the free exchanges in a market economy increases general wealth, although not in equal measure.  I don't think we can blame Monopoly, but this zero sum mentality is the leading cause of misunderstanding of the market.  Of course, games need winners and losers.  They are only games after all.  And one reason we like games is that, unlike life, they provide definitive results, but we would not like those kinds of results in real life.

Anyway, kids don’t play Monopoly like we did.  They have other options.   

Posted by Broadnax at 12:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Our Foreign Service evaluation period ends this month and it is time again for all of us to list our myriad achievements in a couple pages of dense prose.  I hate that.  Coming from my conservative Midwestern background where bragging was discouraged and ridiculed, I am at a significant disadvantage vis-à-vis those who consider pushing oneself forward a pleasure.  I have always hated hustlers and hustling.  But there is the time for those things. 

I have gotten better at it and developed methods and rationalizations that help me through.   My best method is to imagine I am writing about someone else.   In my job, I often have to “sell” ideas.   I make the self-promotion exercise just another job like that.  I have never lied or even exaggerated in any of my assessments, but it is amazing how different achievements can seem when put in context or surrounded by the right words and phrases.  And I guess I have done all right in the promotion game, despite all the gnashing of teeth. 

If you stayed in the Foreign Service for 200 years, things would even out and you would probably end up more-or-less where you deserve, but in the course of a 20 year career there can be lots of random events that affect your success.   I know very capable colleagues who suffered some kind of career downdraft through little or no fault of their own and forever stalled at mid-level and there are a happy few who have risen to very high ranks on the strength of some random occurrence or lucky break. Of course, some people can't get ahead no matter what breaks they get, but chance matters too.

Good or bad luck can affect whole generations, so you have to compare people to their peers.  During the middle 1990s, it was very hard even for good people to get promoted because they were cutting the FS.  It is easier now when we are expanding hiring.  I read in a biography of Eisenhower that he despaired of ever getting another promotion back in the late 1930s.  But it worked out for him.  His became "the class the stars fell on" (the class of 1915 produced 59 generals out of 164 graduates, not bad) when WWII expanded the army. Eisenhower, Bradley, Marshall, Nimitz, Halsey etc were able men and they were successful, but had the war come five years later we would have had a whole different set of five-star leaders.  Colonel Eisenhower might have found himself called out of retirement to run a training program, but the crusade in Europe would have had a different champion.  "There is a tide in the affairs of men ..." 

Below is a statue of Gen John Pershing, General of the Armies, the only man to attain that rank during his own lifetime.   Later Congress passed a law stipulating that no American ever had or could outrank George Washington.

Losers blame their circumstances, and they are right just enough to keep the idea plausible. With the caveat of comparison mentioned above, promotions are correlated to actual merit, but certainly not perfectly correlated.  There is a statistical quality to them, which is not always fair or right, but in the long term and for the most part you can understand what happened.    

Some people have opportunities dropped in their laps; others have to work hard to find them.  You do need opportunity to shine, but what you do with it makes all the difference.  The FS is a very good laboratory for achievement because we have such a variety of jobs and we move among them.  Even though we are all similar in background, and the FS test ensures that we are all smart in the academic sense, you can really see the difference people can make in positions.  Posts and positions may suddenly become important and effective just because a new person has come in.  The reverse is also true. 

In my observation, chronic underperformers are those that avoid responsibility and refuse to make consequent decisions.   It has to do with that opportunity thing I mentioned above.  In choosing mediocrity, they cannot be blamed for failure, but they also never have the opportunity to succeed.   In a knowledge organization like the FS, the preferred method to avoid responsibly is to over analyize every situation and then spread risk by involving lots of marginal participants in your decision making.  I don’t think that most of those doing this really understand the implicit choices they are making.  They think they are being prudent and honestly don’t understand why their list of achievements pales next to those of their “crazier” and “less hard working” colleagues.

I have real trouble understanding how I achieved the success that I have enjoyed and I cannot believe that I deserve it.  This doubt is not a malady I suffer alone.  I find that most successful people who are honest and self-aware fear that they are frauds whose mistakes and faults will someday be embarrassingly revealed.  This is a useful attitude.  It keeps us more humble and stimulates a desire for continuous correction and improvement. I pity the fools who believe they have no serious faults left to correct.  But self-doubt can result in the risk-avoiding mediocrity I mention above and you have to be careful not to be overly influenced humility and self-doubt at evaluation time.  Evaluations are comparisons.  In this universe of imperfect people, where do you stand in relation to others? Nobody is perfect and the ostensible quest for perfection is another way people avoid responsibly to make choices. 

Posted by Broadnax at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Most people are uncomfortable with the exercise of authority and they usually resent those who do.   Lord Acton’s observation about the corrupting nature of power still applies.  ("Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men."

Nevertheless, establishing order requires authority and w/o basic order, nothing much gets done.  Power need not be overly coercive and the most effective leaders are those who welcome the participation of other.    I have written on this subject on many occasions.  But sometimes you come to a bottom line where a decision must be made.   In those times, a leader who refuses to make the hard decisions is shirking his duty. 

  Leaders who refuse to lead are the leading cause of unhappiness in the workplace, IMO.   Worst of all are the guys who won’t lead, but like to boss.  Next worse are the ones who hide among the rules.  Rules apply to most situations and all routine decisions.  You need leadership for those times when they don’t. Leadership requires the exercise of judgment, which will always seem arbitrary to those who disagree.   

I learned an interesting lesson from an exercise in my leadership seminar last year.  Reference this link for details.  I don’t think it was the one intended.   I was chosen as a group leader by a more or less random and unfair procedure.   In the exercise, points were distributed based on rank but were also earned by individual and group effort.  I determined that our group could score lots more points if we cooperated and with my two leadership colleagues, we created a system that distributed the points fairly.  The facilitators were surprised and (I think) a little chagrined that we were scoring so many points w/o dissention.   We soon got dissention, when another group used the rules to seize power, despite the fact that it cost us all points.   The lesson I took was that the essential task of power is to maintain it.   Nasty and Machiavellian as it might seem, the simple fact is that you cannot accomplish your goals (even if your goal is to pass along power to someone else) if you are deposed.  Weak leadership does nobody any good.

I am reading a book Alex gave me for Christmas called Rubicon.  It is about the fall of the Roman Republic.   The author is very talented, but he evidently doesn’t like the Romans.  His description characterizes them almost as an infestation that infected and ultimately destroyed the ancient cultures of the Mediterranean.   Their virtues of perseverance, bravery and patriotism are seen as merely enablers of their cruelty.   A couple months ago I finished a book called Empires of Trust, which left almost the opposite impression.  I have been reading Roman history for a long time.  They are both right.   The Romans established the greatest Empire in history and brought order, a degree of justice & prosperity to the lands of Europe, Africa and Asia that surrounded the Mediterranean and now are thirty-six separate nations.  They were brave, resolute, consequent and practical.  They were also cruel, mendacious, superstitious and capricious.  In other words, they displayed all the usual attributes of power.

I admire the Romans, with all their faults.   Our world is very much based on theirs.  Our American constitution embodies many of the lessons of Rome, only better.  I believe in progress and that sometimes we can learn from history.   We learned from the Romans and we can be better than they were because we stand on their shoulders.  The fatal flaw of the Roman organization was their messy succession procedure.  Augustus established the principate (became emperor) through stealth and maintained it with the fiction that he was merely the first among equals.   He is recognized as a political genius and a great man for his achievement and it was probably the only way to pull it off.   But it avoided some of the responsibly of power and made each transition an unpredictable adventure which often involved murder and the exercise of military muscle.

The Romans were hated and justifiably feared because of their power.  They deprived the people of the Mediterranean of political freedom, what we would today call national self-determination.   If you annoyed the Romans, you paid a high price.   But the Roman Empire provided a great deal of liberty, tolerance and personal autonomy.  (Of course all ancient societies were horrible and oppressive by modern standards.   Remember that progress thing.  But compared with the available alternatives, you were probably better off living in the Roman Empire than anyplace else in the world at the time.)

Above - Romans perfected the dome and pioneered the use of concrete in buildings.

Most of my ancestors were among the barbarians who destroyed the Empire and I imagine my grandfather many generations removed scratching himself in the Forum trying w/o success to figure out how all that water got to the fountains.  The Empire fell in 476 in the West (although it hung on until 1453 in Constantinople) but the idea of Rome persisted and the whole world is heir to their achievement.  You can see it in architecture from Shanghai to Seattle.  Washington looks a lot like a Roman city.  The Romans were not very original, but they were experts at assimilating and developing ideas from a diversity of sources.  They developed what became our concepts of rule of law, citizenship, the concept of a republic and separation of powers, so we Americans are especially indebted to them.   Our Founding Fathers knew what we sometimes forget.   

Posted by Broadnax at 11:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The U.S. Marines are a learning organization.   During the year I was lucky enough to serve with them in Iraq, I was continually amazed at how fast information spread among them.   Then it would mutate, improve and become better adapted to the situation at hand.   The USMC skill and alacrity as a learning organizing was a necessary and key component of our success in Anbar province in 2006-8.   They adapted to changing circumstances and overcame obstacles.    

Like all greatness, the USMC success is based on apparent contradiction. The Marines manage simultaneously to be hierarchical and egalitarian.   The also have very strict rules and at the same time very flexible execution.  The commander’s intent is very important even if it turns out that the specific instructions did not survive first contact.  Finally, virtually all Marines are intensely interested in helping other Marines, although this is sometimes masked by their tough exteriors.  Officers take responsibility and interest in their men.   They spend a lot of time mixing and talking with them.   This is one of the things that make them a learning organization.   A lot of information passes informally.  The leader, in one sense, provided the organizational connective tissue. Anyway, scholars have studied Marine leadership for literally centuries and I know there is a lot more, but those are the lessons I took and the ones I think apply generally.

The Marine organization I saw in action in Iraq contradicts many of the stereotypes we hear about them.  I realize, however,  that if I say that I want my organization to be more like the Marines, most people will conjure up an image far different from the one I envision.   So let me fall back on some other ideas that have stood the test of time and are similar but civilian.  

I read In Search of Excellence when I started my MBA in Minneapolis in 1983.  It is hard to recall now what a ray of hope that book was for me and my classmates.  We were coming off the terrible end of the 1970s and had recently suffered double digit unemployment, double digit inflation and mortgage interest rates that reached 20%.  Pundits told us that America could not longer compete in the world.  We were doomed to become the hinterland for the Japanese juggernaut.   Our business models were defunct, they told us, and we better get used to being second rate, or at best a clumsy dysfunctional giant.  This wasn’t how it turned out, but the future didn’t seem very promising when the book came out in 1982. 

Posted by Broadnax at 09:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I give up.   For many years I have been looking for a grand unified theory of persuasion or at least of public affairs.  I have read hundreds of books about the subject and thousands of articles.   I have listened carefully to skilled practitioners and tried a lot of things out for myself.  I have achieved success, suffered failure and tried to apply the lessons of each.  I have looked for the pattern; inferred the pattern and imposed a pattern where none really existed.  But the long search has reached a dead end ... and an insight. (The owl of Minerva flies only at dusk.)

Below is the Library of Congress.  There are several other buildings which together contain the accumulated knowledge of humanity.  All you have to do is look for it.

I could not find a grand unified theory of persuasion and public affairs because none exists.   I have to be content with tactical success and experimentation.   The best strategy is to follow up and double down where things work and abandon failure as quickly and cleanly as possible. 

An organization that can do this is not omniscient; it is robust and opportunistic.  In an uncertain world, we are always playing the probabilities.  It is a world where the best plan might fail and the worst succeed, but in the course of repeated tries and many actions, the better ones make progress. It is an evolutionary system that unfolds through iterations; the truth is revealed conditionally and gradually.  It cannot be choreographed in advance.

I remain a believer in truth and in seeking truth.  It is just that I do not believe that we humans have the capacity to find the big truths.  Actually, I am not giving up the search, but I am switching methods. Repeated inquiry and intelligent analysis of both process and results will bring us to an approximation of practical truth, wrong in many details but useful for decision making in the situations for which it was developed.   

You don’t need to know the whole truth to know what to do.  We have to walk the line between recklessness and paralysis.  At some point we know enough to jump.  That point comes when we estimate the probabilities are good enough – not perfect, but good enough - when the probable outcome of doing something is better than waiting.   We will be wrong a lot.  We need to be robust because omniscience, or even understanding most things, is not an option available to mortal man.  We are always wrong to some extent.

“Often wrong, but never in doubt.”

That is how they described MBAs when I was at the University of Minnesota B-school. It was meant pejoratively, but it is not a bad strategy.   If you more likely to be right than wrong and the rewards of success are significant while the cost of failure is not catastrophic, the smart decision is just do it.  If it works, do it again and improve it.  If it doesn’t work, figure out why and do something better. 

Just because you don’t have a detailed plan doesn’t mean you don’t have a plan. Often the best plan is the structure of the choice architecture in the organization itself.  Giving people a broad goal in an organization structured to take advantage of opportunity and can learn from experience is the best plan you can have in a changing world.  After it works, you can take credit for prescience if taking credit is important to you. 

Ask the guy in the kayak about his precise plan before he hits the white water around the bend.   It is better to know you can adapt to what will come than to develop a bogus detailed strategy for everything that could be on the way.  

Posted by Broadnax at 12:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I am still trying to understand the new communication technologies.  As I look back and forward, I come again to the constant in all communication.  Technologies don’t talk.  All communication happens between humans and humans.  

Posted by Broadnax at 02:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mobile devices, such as cell phones, notebook computers and even hand-held games, may soon be the way most people get their news and information and become their primary way of accessing the Internet.    We have to be there too.  Some places may bypass conventional computers altogether (much like cellular technology bypassed land-lines), especially as more and more features are added to mobile devices.   Cell phones now come bundled with still and/or video cameras, global positioning systems and sophisticated computing capabilities.  Mobile devices fundamentally change people’s relationship to information because they are available any time and almost anywhere.   Mobile devices allow individuals to report what they see on the spot, along with pictures and connections.   User created content has essentially made individuals into media.  

Above is the hall of the new visitors' center at the Capitol.  It took them years longer and a lot more money.  The guard told me that they had to reinforce all the doors and walls to make them more resilient in case of terrorism.  This extra precaution costs us billions, but you gotta have it.

Experts from private industry traded experience with veteran public diplomacy officers when International Information Programs (IIP) and the Foreign Service Institute (FSI) explored innovative and imaginative new ways to leverage mobile technologies for public diplomacy during a conference held at NFATC on February 19.  

It quickly became clear that mobile media, despite all the highfalutin hoopla, is just another part of the new media environment.  Several of the speakers emphasized the necessity of flexibility in the uncertain and protean world of the new media.    The new media is more fluid, fragmented, decentralized and personalized than more traditional media.  This creates challenges and opportunities for public diplomacy as well as for the traditional way we deliver messages at State Department.

Hearing the experts at the conference talk about exciting new communications technologies and even more coming soon, it also became clear that changes in new media environment are coming at an accelerating rate.  We have already seen some of yesterday’s most promising stars become today’s dinosaurs.   There is no reason to think this will be any different tomorrow, so it is silly and to try to pick winners among the new media.  Besides, we don’t have to.  We have an “all of the above” option.  What we have to do is experiment, recognizing that many will fail, but we will learn from the experiments that fail and that even those that succeed will work in unexpected ways requiring flexible responses.   The new media allows us to be flexible and being flexible means that we don’t choose “the best.”   Instead we try all appropriate methods, choosing the mix of media tools we think will work best for particular tasks.   We must use technology but not get beguiled by it, remembering that communication is the destination and the technology merely the vehicle we use to get there.  The mix will usually involve the newest technology used in the latest ways, but it will just as often include simple proven techniques such as personal visits.   Remember, we have the “all of the above” option.  Those are some of the lessons I learned at the conference.

Through all the changes in technologies, Edward R. Murrow’s famous observation remains true, “The really crucial link in the international communication chain is the last three feet, which is bridged by personal contact, one person talking to another.”   My colleagues and I at IIP understand that but we also know that we need to use all available and appropriate technologies to get within communication range.

I was happy to be able to attend this conference on mobile communications and proud that IIP is looking forward to the future, as demonstrated by its organizing this sort of meeting.  State Department is indeed using a variety of media to carry out its public diplomacy.   My colleagues at IIP are using twitter, Facebook, webchats, webcasts, podcasts, Youtube, digital video, blogs, online gaming and various mobile technologies to complement our more traditional Internet, speakers, outreach and publications.   Colleagues in other parts of State Department are also making innovations that harness the talents of State’s professionals.   It is an exciting time to work in public diplomacy. 

Posted by Broadnax at 12:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

In a classic episode of M*A*S*H, Father Mulcahy grows some sweet corn.  After a summer of hard work and anticipation, he harvests the crop, turns it over to the chow hall cook and everybody looks forward to the hometown taste of fresh roasted corn.  But the cook has removed the corn from the cob and creamed it into the kind of slop he usually dispenses.  Insulted by the complaints, he replies indignantly, “I was just trying to be helpful. Next Fourth of July you can eat it on the cob for all I care.” 

Above is General Grant in front of the Capitol.  Grant was an unassuming man.  He could easily pass unnoticed.  They said that the only way you could tell if Grant was around was that things started to happen.   Grant was a great general, but he failed at everything else.  Is it enough to be really good at one thing? 

Leadership can be like that.   Sometimes it takes more time and effort to make a mush than to do the effective thing.   It is usually a good idea to lighten up and consider whether your problems are because of instead of in spite of your best efforts, but often the hardest thing to do is nothing.  Most of us have a kind of piece-work mentality.  We think we earn our money by how much we do.  Leadership often means that we add the most value by what we choose to leave undone.

A leadership technique that seems to work is to “get lost,” just be inaccessible.   I know that this goes against every fiber of the stay-connected zeitgeist, but sometimes you add no value and generally when you add no value in an organization, you are sucking up value by getting in the way.   At times when the problem is best solved by someone else, but you know that others may want to consult or defer to your judgment, the best response is to get lost. Doing nothing, BTW, is a very proactive strategy and is the appropriate one only in some situations.   It doesn’t mean you just sneak off to play golf, although in some cases that works by chance.  There are some places where things progress a lot better when the boss is not around and I am not talking about prescribed non-action here.

Of course, the whole technique presupposes that you have already built an environment of trust and autonomy, so that colleagues and subordinates will not merely cower in fear and indecision until your triumphant return.  And that is the big caveat. You are not allowed to reverse the decision for trivial causes and you can never get angry that it was made w/o you.  If you are prone to the character flaws that lead to these behaviors, you need to stay away from this technique, but recognize that your organization will never work at top performance because you won’t allow it.  And stop complaining about all the work you have to do or about your incompetent subordinates. That is the world you created by making yourself indispensable.   Live with it or change it, but in either case shut up about it.

And as the great Charles de Gaulle said, “The graveyards are full of indispensable men.”

I liked the “Book of the Tao” since I first discovered it when I was around twenty.  I bought a book at a used book shop for $0.25 called “The Wisdom of China and India.”  It was published in 1943.  They would never publish such a book today, since it lumped together these two great but very disparate cultures and presumed to aggregate the collected wisdom of most of Asia in one volume.  But it was a great book and I still have it.  The binding disintegrated when I gave it to Alex to read last week, but a little duct tape postponed its day of reckoning.

The philosopher Lao Tzu has some sage (really) advice on leadership and since this wisdom has persisted through various iterations and hundreds of generations, maybe there is something to it. For example:

“The Tao abides in non-action, yet nothing is left undone.  If kings and lords observed this, the ten thousand things would develop naturally.”

or

"Nothing is softer than water, yet nothing can be better at overcoming the hard."

and

“A leader is best when people barely know he exists, when his work is done, his aim fulfilled, they will say: we did it ourselves.”

If you translated this wisdom into more modern terms, you would say that this sort of leadership taps into the intelligence and imagination of the people.  It makes them partners.  This is especially valuable when innovations are needed.  (Please refer to my posting re management gurus.) Centralized, directive leadership can almost never identify and develop innovation because whether they mean to or not, they bring the power of the organizing to bear to defend the status quo or permit only incremental and usually ineffective change.  

Posted by Broadnax at 05:35 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Sometimes we don’t like the drivers of innovation, but we like the innovation.   The science of probably and statistics was largely developed to serve gamblers.  They were the ones who really cared about properly figuring the odds and they were the ones who provided real working laboratories where elegant theories could be tested in relation the vagaries of human nature.    We can thank gamblers for our ability to assess risk and make better decisions about the complex interactions in our world.  A good book on this subject is Against the Gods: the Remarkable Story of Risk.

If we needed gambling to stimulate us to understand our complex civilization, we can thank war for having civilization in the first place.   The organizational structures our ancestors developed to provide protection and – truth be told – to dominate their neighbors were adapted to other tasks.  Causality in human events is always complex, with causes creating effects that become causes in ways that make it impossible to separate.    But throughout history you find a strong correlation between success at war and success in other endeavors of civilization.   This implies that the skill sets are at least overlapping.

In our own times, we can point to a variety of technological advances produced as a result of conflicts.  The Internet and the Interstate systems were begun to make our country more resilient in the face of massive attacks.   The conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan have forced innovations in emergency medicine, which are already saving lives in trauma centers around the world.     

Even if more total lives are saved because of wartime innovations than were lost in the conflicts themselves, we should be able to produce similar advances absent the destruction, but we don’t seem able to do that.   Maybe we humans need a threat to get off our asses, jettison some of the inertia of old comfortable habits and maybe sweep away the resistance of powerful individuals or interest groups benefiting from the old way of doing things.

The things that drive a lot of innovation in computer technologies are online games and pornography.   These are the applications that demand more and more bandwidth and greater computing speeds.    I don’t really need a very advanced computer for the simple word processing and accounting programs that I run and people like me really don’t push the innovators to imagine the better future.   It is the gamers on the edge that do it.

My boys play “World of Warcraft” online.   There are something like 12 million (and that number grows every day) players around the world forming an online community.   Few of them stop to think about the significance of what they are doing.   They have created a seamless communication network where participants dispersed throughout the world react in cooperation and in real time to actions conveyed by sophisticated moving images around the world at the speed of light.   What can be done in the “World of Warcraft” today will be done in the worlds of medicine, manufacturing, finance and science.   Today’s gamers (or their parents) are financing the innovation and, more importantly they are managing and testing them every day when they play their games.  Somenare already taking the skills and insights learned in virtual worlds and innovatively applying them to their real world jobs.   The skills that helped them overcome the Lich King serve them well in the struggles with the competition. 

BTW - I think one of the reasons we often do better than would be predicted by looking at our school systems is that much learning - and most innovation - is done outside classrooms and away from the formal teachers. 

The games teach the pluses of planning, the dangers of lost control and the problems of managing staffs or teams. Take a look at this youtube video.   You can google WTF and world of warcraft and south park if you want to see more.

Above is a World of Warcraft city.

Maybe the dweeb playing video games is preparing better for life the nerd doing the homework the teacher exactly as the teacher says.

Posted by Broadnax at 12:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Please read this linked article first.  All the pictures are taken today in places where I have been running for more than ten years.  I have been observing what changed and what stayed the same during that time.  The picture texts could be read independent of the general text.

I was still thinking re the ivy problem and the general problem of native and invasive species.   Let me stipulate that there are real problems with invasive species.  In fact, I would rate it as one of the most important problems we face, bar none.   The Washington Post has an article today on potential release of Asian oysters into the Chesapeake, which is one of the high risk plays that scare everyone involved.  On the personal side,  I spend many days fighting the Chinese paradise trees that infest parts of my forest land and they seem to be in league with another invasive – the multiflora rose – which makes approaching them painful.   So I know the problem with invasive theoretical and practical.

Below is an ivy covered culvert.  It has been holding the soil since before 1997, when I first saw it.  The ivy slows the storm water and allows it to soak in.  Ivy is low/no maintenance and nothing else would grow as well in this shady and stressful environment.  This human environment will NEVER be like the natural world.  The rain quickly runs off the impervious surfaces and washes away soil and most vegetation...but not ivy. It would be foolish to forgo this option.

But the whole concept of invasive lies on a continuum.   Horses are not native to North America, at least since their ancestors disappeared here during Pleistocene.   Nature did not place the horse on our continent; the Spaniards and English did the job.   Few people today consider horses an invasive species, but they are.   In fact, wild horses get special legal protection.   Also among the immigrants are honey bees, white clover, cows, sheep, wheat and even earthworms.   It is clear that these species have altered the environment in profound ways;  they made the land more productive and it would be insane to try to eradicate them.   On the other hand, we have chestnut blight, snakeheads, kudzu, wild hogs, Chinese longhorn beetles, emerald ash borers … the list goes on.

Below is an alternative to ivy - concrete.  Storm water rushes down and floods stream beds.  This culvert, BTW, is above the ivy in the picture, so it rushes into the ivy, where it is slowed down and tamed.

Reasonable people disagree about where to draw the line.   Norway maples are the most common street trees in the upper Midwest.   Are they invasive?  Some people think so.  They replaced the American elm, almost eradicated by the invasive Dutch elm disease.  The salmon introduced into the Great Lakes are generally well received.   They replaced the lake trout, wiped out by the invasive lamprey eel.    We cannot dial the history back to the past, and what year would we choose anyway?  Species composition is always changing. 

Below - somebody dumped gravel into this low spot to slow erosion.  They still mow the grass all around.  Maybe ivy would be better than this alternative.

The problem of invasiveness is really a type of cost/benefit calculation.    My own bias is to prefer native species - actually local species – because they have been around together a long time and have a demonstrated adaption to the nearby environment.   But I do not limit my choices to only local species because I recognize that human activities have changed the environment sometimes rendering the previous adaption less adaptive.   The human changed environment is the new environment.  The old one is only historical.

Below - imagine the force the stormwater will achieve as it rushes down this hill in a concrete culvert wth no plants to slow it down and no possibility of soaking into the ground.

This last part is important.  Every species is adapted to a niche.   But the niche is not the species and the species is not the occupant of the niche.  A species that occupies a very narrow niche is probably on its way to extinction in our rapidly changing world.   One of the definitions of an invasive species is that it can invade several niches and do it well.   This is also an advantage.  

Below is a local stream where most of the water running through the culverts ends up.  The impervious surfaces and the fast water runoff ensures that it floods and erodes.  The rip-rap holds it somewhat, but it requires consistent attention.

Posted by Broadnax at 10:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Two of the most easily observed (in others) but difficult to counter biases are that we over-weight recent events and we rely too much on easily available information.  I thought about this when I saw the results of a recent poll re the best president.  Americans rate Reagan #1, according to Gallup, followed by Kennedy, Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt and then Washington. 

Humans are programmed to take shortcuts when trying to understand situations and some of these patterns go way back.  They work in simple situations with good and timely feedback – i.e. the kinds of situations our Pleistocene ancestors faced on the African plains trying to avoid becoming leopard food – but lead us astray on complex choices where the effects are separated from the causes in time and space – i.e. much of what we deal with in the modern world.  

I think all those presidents were okay, but no matter what you think of the actual merits of that presidential preference, what are the chances that the two best presidents would have been in office within living memory?   You get this same sort of bias when you ask about the greatest people in history in general.  There is a bias toward people of the late 20^th Century.   What does this say about people taking the long view? And what does that mean for our practice of persuasion?

Below is the merry-go-round at the Smithsonian.

I bet Lincoln would have moved up in the standings if the poll had been taken yesterday or right after some kind of television special. 

There are a lot of good books on these sorts of bias, BTW.  Most have some connection to prospect theory.  The easiest to understand book on the subject is called simply Decision Traps.  It is an old (1990) book.  A more recent one that covers some of the same ground is Nudge.  Nudge is more recent and more readily available, so I suppose it will be given more weight.

BTW (2) a few more of the pernicious rules of thumb include:

Confirmation bias – people search out and remember information that confirms rather than challenges their current beliefs.

Vividness - particularly vivid experiences or images interfere with judgment.

Anchors – people consciously or unconsciously set baselines and then have trouble adjusting.   This is why salesmen and lawyers try to get a big number mentioned up front.   That becomes the anchor from which all adjustments are made.

BTW (3) I think the greatness of presidents should be measured by how crucial they were to the development of our country. 

W/o Washington, there would be no U.S. as we know it, so I would rate him #1.  Lincoln saved the Union and made it what it became, so he is #2.   Other transformative presidents were F. Roosevelt, Reagan and Jackson.  In that order they were great.  

Kennedy was okay but not great, IMO.  T. Roosevelt was a great character, but at time that didn't call for greatness.  Wilson had some great ideas, but he was unable to carry them through.   Jefferson was a great and crucial thinker, but not a great president.  Ditto the father of the Constitution James Madison.   Truman and Eisenhower were very good, but not great. 

Posted by Broadnax at 11:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If I could read only one magazine a week, it would be “The Economist” because it has such a variety of topics written in a style I enjoy. I have subscribed to the Economist since I was in graduate school and it has contributed as much to my education as my grad school experience.  Actually, all education, formal and otherwise, builds what went before.   I was reminded of that today with this Economist article on Fredrick Taylor. 

I met Taylor (figuratively) in grad-school when I studied operations research.   He is the father of “scientific management” and while I think the strict application of his theory is probably a bad thing (Lenin was a Taylor fan), he did start the systematic study of management processes that has done a lot to create the modern prosperity we now enjoy.   Peter Drucker wrote that Taylor was, “the first man in history who did not take work for granted, but looked at it and studied it. His approach to work is still the basic foundation”.    That was worth something.  

I don’t like the practical and complete application of the theories.   Even if you don’t know Taylor, you know his work.  He is the time management guy, the one who set loose all those guys with clipboards and stopwatches to measure workers.   “In our scheme, we do not ask the initiative of our men. We do not want any initiative. All we want of them is to obey the orders we give them, do what we say, and do it quick.”  That assumes you don't want innovation or initiative. This was the frightening world of “Modern Times” or “Metropolis” and in the early 20th Century the trends didn’t look good.  Fortunately trends never continue and we got back to a more human and humane system, at least in theory.  Humans don't work like machines and everybody is better off if everybody is thinking.

That's Taylor on the left.

Ford Edsel and New Coke are spectacular examples of how even the most sophisticated marketing and biggest bucks cannot sell a product people don’t want.  But we are talking about tangible products in these cases.   Each time you tasted New Coke, you were given another chance to test for yourself.   Everybody who saw or drove an Edsel could make his/her own judgment.   Imagine if you had ONLY the advertisements about these products and/or you had to depend on what others said about them.  Go one further. Imagine that much of what you had almost no opportunity to make independent verifications and that almost everybody involved in explaining to you had a vested interest in misleading you, or at least spinning the facts.  Now you are in the world of public affairs.

Abraham Lincoln famously said that “You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you can’t fool all of the people all of the time.”  This sentence is designed with the encouraging part as the punch line, but it not really very encouraging.    Phase it just a little differently.  Some of the people are always fooled.  Some of the people are sometimes not fooled, but all of the people are fooled some of the time.  Mr. Lincoln wisely didn’t speculate about how many people would sometimes not be fooled or the amount of influence they might exert on the benighted majority.

Posted by Broadnax at 07:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The world is too complex to be understood directly, so we use simplified mental models to make sense of things.   All of us have habitual models – metaphors – that we fit w/o much thought to the events in our world.    The model/metaphor we use determines what we do.    But none of our models is reality.  They fit more or less well, and to the extent the model is a bad fit, we make bad decisions that follow with perfect logic from our assumptions.

Give a man a hammer, every problem starts to look like a nail.   The model makes a difference.  The most explicit models we employ are often related to sports.  Think about how different the results can be.    A football model will entail planning by a leader and execution by different people, each with specific specializations (quarterback, linebacker etc) on the field in separate steps with pauses between moves.  Basketball, with its continuous fluid and reactive action, produces a very different model evoke very understanding of the problem.    I often wonder how many of our international misunderstandings result from our football metaphor versus their football/soccer way of simplifying reality.

Explicit models are treacherous enough, but it is the IMPLICIT models – the ones we use w/o thinking – put the biggest hurt on us.  Framing the model is the most important part of decision making, but it is often completely overlooked.    Decision makers often assume models out of habit or inertia and then cannot understand why their perfectly logical choices that flow from their premises do not produce the expected results.     Reality is too complex and confusing.  You have to have a model to simplify it, but make it a good one.

My preferred model is ecological, specifically forestry, and I have worked to refine my understanding of this model and its application.   No model is perfect, but this one is robust because it accounts for interaction of complex factors, properly accounts for the effects of time, anticipates changes in conditions and anticipates random shocks.  The most important insight in this model is that the actions you take will change the expected outcomes and they will never produce proportional results.    Little inputs can create very large results, very large inputs may produce almost nothing and change come in spurts and lumps.   This doesn’t make intuitive sense because we tend to think in terms or physical models where inputs relate directly to outputs.   If I pour eight ounces of water into a cup, I expect to find eight ounces.   In a biological model, eight ounces may result in a gallon of result or nothing at all; or it might produce no visible result for a long time and then make a big jump.  

You also learn that some things take time to work and extra resources cannot rush the process and that there are some things you just cannot have, not matter how much you want them or how good it would be to get them.

Many people think that if we just all agree, we can have all we want.   When it doesn’t work out, they assume there must be some villains standing in the way.  But in the real world, there are many things we cannot have right away – we have to wait – lots of things we cannot have simultaneously and some things we cannot have at an acceptable cost and things we cannot have at all no matter what cost we are willing to pay.   And this happens naturally.  Villains are optional.    And often you don’t get what you think you want, but what you get is better.  Sustained interaction with the natural world teaches these lessons.   That is why forestry is a good model.  But it takes time to learn. 

Posted by Broadnax at 09:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

A guy on the radio today was complaining that he lost all his money invested with Burnie Madoff.  He made his money with many years of hard work in the NY garment industry and Madoff took it all, according to the report  I know we are all supposed to feel sympathy or even outrage.   He was the victim of a crook you could understand how he lost SOME of his money. But this guy claimed to have a couple million dollars invested, all of it with Madoff.   When you money like that, you have the capacity to diversity.   If you diversify you don’t lose ALL your money.  Although what the newly poor old guy describes might be a personal tragedy for him and from his point of view, it is not a random outcome and it was not beyond his control.   

You have to ask yourself why somebody might have so much invested in one place, why they insisted on putting all their eggs into one basket.   The answer is never flattering.    The least offensive is that the basket keeper is just ignorant.   More likely are elements of sloth, greed & a flexible definition of honesty. 

This is certainly not the first time people have been caught up in this sort of scheme and it won’t be the last.   Many financial histories begin with the South Sea Bubble or the Dutch tulip mania, which was the first recorded speculative bubble way back in 1637.  The patterns are clear.   Somebody offers the prospect of unusually high returns with minimal risk doing something that is difficult to understand.   They often are also exclusive and have the slight odor of something skating near the edge of the regulations.   That is ostensibly why they can make the big bucks.  Ironically, they also sell the schemes by implying that the investment is safe because it will be protected by regulators.  The regulations provide a kind of cover that encourages credulous investors to take greater risk.  They  think they are clever, cleverer than the average people with their pedestrian investments. 

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is.   There is nothing wrong with making risky investments.   Risk is how you make high returns, but you need to understand what risk means.   Risk means that you are trading a greater chance of losing part or all your investment in return for the chance of making more money.    You can manage risk by diversifying your investments.   A good number of investments that are individually very risky can be low risk when they are put together.   You might lose all your money in one investment, but you gain enough on others to make up for it. Nobody can predict the future, so the only way to protect yourself is to spread your assets.   

You can still lose big money, as almost everybody has in the recent hard times, but you won’t get wiped out.  You get problems when you try to identify the ONE winning thing. Never do that. This is Investment 101.

If you went back in time before the crashes and told investors in Madoff/Enron/Keating/etc that they should be getting money out of these things and spreading their risk, most would have turned you down.   They were making the big bucks and wanted to keep on making them. How stupid would you have to be to take money out of such winning investments? 

A couple years ago, I watched a program about a bunch of the victims of Charles Keating.  I saw one angry old man who actually tried to spit on Keating. I think it was the same guy who sat with his son for an interview. His son was a financial planner and he asked why his father didn’t ask for advice before sinking all his savings into this investment.  The old man answered honestly, “Because I knew you would tell me not to do it.” He wanted the returns and figured he could get it risk free.  A fool and his money ...

Anyone who promises very high returns w/o risk, is lying and/or doing something dishonest and anybody who still chooses to invest is stupid or dishonest or both.   With the freedom to choose comes the responsibly to choose responsibly.  

It is too bad that the old guy on NPR Radio will have to find a job at Wal-Mart or Seven-Eleven, but according to what he said himself, he gradually liquated all his other investments so that all his money was left with Madoff.  You don’t do that even when investing with someone who is perfectly honest because shit happens.  I guess some people have to learn that for themselves and something we have to learn as a society every couple of years.

Posted by Broadnax at 02:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Below are CJ and the boys near Mt Washington in NH in 2003.

I found this while going through some old emails.  I wrote this to Mariza when she was off to college.  My “great books” for her first year are a little idiosyncratic.  Some books are influential because of the things you are going through in your life when you read them.   When you reread the book, you realize that it is important to you because of what you read into it. 

You have to interact with ideas.   Nobody can be right all the time and I have never come across a book that is good through to the very end.  The authors that influenced me gave me good starts, but none of them lived in my circumstances and I had to modify them accordingly.    That gives me an ideal escape clause.  When I recommend books, I assume that you will interact with the ideas.  Some will be useful; others not.  And even best author or philosopher will say at least a few really stupid things and sometimes a fool can have a useful insight (even if he doesn’t recognize it himself.)

Anyway, I left the note as it was in 2003.  I would make a few changes and additions if I wrote it today.   I personally find it interesting because I can remember some of the things I was thinking about and going through when I wrote the note.  For example, in 2003 I was studying pragmatism, so it was more prominent in my thoughts than it would have been before or since.  Everything depends on contexts, times and places.

Books

Now that you are off to your education, I want to share some of the books that have influenced me for the better.  Few of these things were assigned to me in school.   But I think they formed the basis of the education I use today.

“In Search of Excellence” – Formed the basis of my management and leadership style.  Also influenced my view on human relationships in general.   I bought my copy in 1983, when just before I started my MBA at the University of Minnesota.  It just hit the right chord.  I still have the book I bought, with my underlining and notes.  It is amazing how much I internalized those thoughts.  

“The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People” – This is the “execution” book of my life and provides the “how”.  It helps me know how to act with integrity and purpose when I might not be sure what to do.  I read this book in 1990 and compared the ideal to the best bosses I had known.  (I worked for a guy called Brian Carlson at the time and he was a great example.) I tried to be like them and like the person the book made me want to be.

“Two Cheers for Capitalism” by Irving Kristol – I found this book by chance in the University of Wisconsin library in 1978.  It made clear to me that I believed in the free market. It set the dominos in motion that sent me to business school with vigor and enthusiasm and then into the Foreign Service to fight world Communism.  On a related item is “The Communist Manifesto” and excerpts from “Capital”.   One of my leftist professors made me read them in 1977.  It had the opposite result from the one I think he wanted to achieve.  I found them to be such unmitigated crap that I was permanently soured on socialism. 

“The Bible”, especially Mathew, St. Paul and Ecclesiastes – I am not strongly religious, but the Bible provides the foundation of faith that I need in my life.  It is the essence of things hoped for; the evidence of things unseen.   I have never read the entire Bible, but have read several times the parts above and heard it in church more times than I can remember.  I am not sure how Ecclesiastes got into the Bible, since it seems a little cynical and world wise, but I like it.  It is a good antidote to things like Amos. 

“The Peloponnesian War” by Thucydides.  Thucydides was my favorite historian when I was an undergraduate.  I read his work in English and part in the original Greek.  It is the classic tragic view of history and one I regrettably share.  His account of the Syracuse campaign actually has all the aspects of tragedy in the technical sense and the Melian dialogue is a classic of power politics.  I would add Polybius and Tacitus and everyone should be familiar with the Iliad and Odyssey.    Although I have long since forgotten the particulars, I recall the sweep.   As for classic philosophy, I can't recommend Plato or his ilk, except the “Apology of Socrates” which is short and well worth reading.  It was the first work I read in Greek.

“Decision Traps” - In this book I learned about how decisions are made in the real world and how to factor inevitable error into my own decisions.  I learned a little humility and at least one valuable technique for learning from experience:  make specific written predictions; put them aside; later analyze them in the light of how event transpired in fact and improve the decision making process.   I read this book for the first time in 1990.   I would add another book to this one as an influence in the same direction, “Against the Gods”, which I read first in 1997.  As I write this (April 19, 2003) I am reading another book, “The Blank Slate” which seems to be supplemental to many of the things I learned in “Decision Traps.” 

Pragmatism – Various things by and about people like William James, Charles Pierce and John Dewey, especially “the Metaphysical Club” This is the most recent wrinkle in my ideological skin.  I find many pragmatic ideas very useful, which is itself pragmatic.  I especially like the idea of the evolution of ideas and the concept that ideas are creations in a human context.  I found many of these ideas embedded in concepts I got from other places, such as the decision traps complex or the “Seven Habits”.   I will also lump into this category Emerson’s essay on “Self Reliance”.  It is not pragmatism, but James et al read it.  It influenced them.  

Biography – this became my favorite form of literature in the middle 1990s.  I guess it comes with age.  I can't cite a particular book, but in general, seeing history though the lives of great people has been instructive.   It shows how much can hang on an individual decision and how fast failure can turn to glorious success or the reverse.  The biographies that stand out in my memory are: Truman, Eisenhower, Robert E. Lee, Ben Franklin, and the joint biography “Founding Brothers”, which is interesting because it shows how individual human flaws can actually enhance the performance of a group.  It is sort of a portfolio theory of human events.

Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu – I loved these guys when I was an undergraduate.  I always like to try to act logically.  Taoism provides the non-logical basis on which a logical edifice can be built.  In the same vein, I would cite “Emotional Intelligence”, which I read in 1997.  Logic can provide the “how” (that I got from the Seven Habits), but preference in based on emotion.  Emotion can never be fully suppressed and we should not try to do so. 

Declaration of Independence, Constitution Preamble, Gettysburg Address, Lincoln’s Second Inaugural, Four Freedoms (FDR).  America’s contribution to world literature is in the language of freedom.  These are some of the best.   

Anyway, these are a good start.  You will find a lot more.  Never stop looking. 

Posted by Broadnax at 10:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Web 2.0/PD 2.0

Initial use of the web for public diplomacy and strategic communications involved online versions of familiar delivery methods, such as magazines, radio and television.  Despite vast differences among them, all these shared the paradigm of one-way communications, where a set message was delivered to a passive audience in a one speaker to many recipients model.  It ignored the web’s special capacity for interaction.  Web 2.0 refers to the way the web has changed the nature of communications, making it interactive, more fluid and less centrally organized. Last year, Internet passed newspapers as a source of news in the U.S.  For young people Internet is beginning to rival television. [1]

We tend to focus on the instant communication aspect of the Internet, but the sinews of its influence are its capacity to find, sort and distribute information.  Powerful search engines give individuals the power enjoyed only by world leaders few decades ago and before that time by nobody at all.  Governments have lost what monopolies they once enjoyed and are now sometimes not even the most prominent voices.  Controlling information is no longer possible.  On the other hand, there is a greater opportunity for engagement to harness the power of the nation and the wisdom of the crowds to produce better and more robust products.   There is no option of ignoring the development.  Internet users demand a degree of interactivity and accept a measure of ambiguity unpredicted a decade ago.   These trends will accelerate as the first generation of digital natives (i.e. kids who don’t remember a world w/o Internet) has reached adulthood.   This is the new world of communications.  Whether we are ready or not, the future has already arrived. 

Interactivity and interrelations

The two concepts to keep in mind are interactivity and interrelatedness.   The first concept is more obvious but the second is more pervasive.   Internet users ostensibly love the possibility of interactivity, but most don’t use it to an extent commensurate with their stated preferences. On any blog, there are dozens, hundreds or thousands of “lurkers” for every active participant.  On the other hand, interrelatedness represents the fundamental power of the Internet and its search engines.  It is the interrelatedness – the unexpected relationships – that makes the Internet such a wonderful and terrible place to do public affairs.

Some say the web provides a venue for the best and the brightest to share ideas w/o the constraints of status or station; others contend it is a place where peculiar people congregate to accrete one dumb notion on top of another.  Both points of view are correct.  The medium of free and often anonymous exchange produces the best and the worst as it emphasizes people on the long tails of the normal distribution.
 
Mass customization

The ubiquity and interactive aspects of Web 2.0 offer public diplomacy the possibility of direct engagement with thousands of individuals on a global scale.  We can bypass the state run media and the various despotic gatekeepers that have long hounded the quest for truth & knowledge.  In the exchange, however, we get a world of constant change, requiring flexibility and creativity, where you have to earn attention again and again every day.  The interactivity means just what the word says.   When we are trying to influence others, we need to open the possibility of being influenced by them. In a free marketplace of ideas, this would be all to the good.  It would produce a synergy greater than the sum of the parts.  The caveat is that this marketplace of ideas is not as free and open as it would appear.

Our own presence in the mix is the first sign of a constrained freedom.  Although our opponents disagree, our activities are generally benign and broadly truthful.  The USG is constrained to tell the truth by its own rules as well as the continual monitoring by our own free media, interests groups and political leaders in opposition.  For the most part, we are probably too timid in the defense of our positions.   Not so our adversaries.  Most of them are heavy handed and incompetent peddlers of web influence, but there are so many out there that some get it right sometimes and others get it right a lot.  When it works for them, their campaign is based on plausible lies, ones that play to stereotypes and prejudice, and often based on caricatures and exaggerations of our own real and verifiable mistakes and missteps.  In a world where significant numbers of people doubt that there was ever a moon landing and where in communities where majorities don’t think Arabs were responsible for the 9/11 attacks, conspiracy theories go a long way.  And the U.S. is probably the single biggest victim of conspiracy theories.  In a world often driven by dispersed impersonal forces, people look for someone to blame.   The U.S. is always there for that purpose.

Countering conspiracy theories with facts and information is futile.   Most conspiracy theories have a built in defense against such quaint ideas as truth or fact.   They are, after all based on “hidden,” “denied,” “secret,” or “occult” information.  True believers in conspiracies derive significant personal status and feelings of self worth from the idea that they know things overlooked by or kept from the masses of people.  It is a true Gnosticism.  As they see it, any counter arguments are merely examples of clever attempts to discredit them.  We have to recognize that some people are incurable conspiracy theory believers.  Others are susceptible to the contagion, but can be cured, but through relationships, not information alone.  A trusted and credible source of the information is what makes the difference.  Web 2.0 provides the opportunity to create such relationships.

In a New World Where Nobody is Well-Loved

We also need to recognize that the constant vetting and finding of flaws, even when done honestly, will create a permanent state of dissatisfaction among large numbers of people.  This is what happens when campaigns go negative and it is just easier to go negative than to defend a positive position.  The U.S., as the most ubiquitous presence in the history of the world, will naturally come under the most scrutiny, fair and foul, but it is a general trend that affects everybody.  The good new in this is that it applies to our adversaries as well as to ourselves.  Al Qaeda’s popularity has also plummeted in recent years among Muslims, for example. [2]

Insiders & Outsiders

Internet 2.0 will strengthen “tribes” as people can go online to find others with whom they identify even across great geographical distances.  (Of course, the tribes I am not talking about are not kinship of linage, but kinship of ideas.)  This may lead to greater trust within groups, as they become more uniform and homogeneous, but also lead to a general decline in tolerance overall, since most people will be out-groups to any particular in groups.   Early hopes that Internet would weave the world together in a kind of cyber age of Aquarius have been dashed against the reality of self-selection and segregation.   In a mass information market, differing viewpoints must be tolerated, not so in the case of core groups of believers autoerotically communicating among themselves on the Internet. Where websites and blogs are most developed, disagreements have become sharper and more venomous.   However, the impersonal/personalization of web interactions allows people with very divergent views to coexist and performs mutually beneficial transactions that would be impossible in a face-to-face world.   General “approval ratings” have already become more transactional and unstable, making it even more important to discount what people tell opinion pollsters and watch what they do and get an idea of their true beliefs by their revealed preferences.

Public diplomacy and the marketing mix

The analogy of public diplomacy with marketing is far from perfect, but it provides some useful insights.  When marketing a product or service, you have to understand which communications techniques are appropriate.  Those useful for selling Coca-Cola are often not valuable for selling passenger jets or legal services.  The same goes for public diplomacy.   Our business is more analogous to selling high end legal services than consumer products.  This informs and constrains our choices.

Public diplomacy involves communicating complicated concepts to people who come from a variety of backgrounds and the U.S. operates in a truly global environment.  It involves long term relationship and trust building.   Messages are more problematic.  Some of our world audiences will react in sometimes violently different ways to the same subject.   Imagine the discussion of U.S. attitudes toward same sex marriage at venues in Amsterdam and Jeddah.  Aspects of the discussion popular in one venue would be odious in the other.  In this interconnected world, messages cannot be neatly targeted to a discrete audience.   Even more challenging is that the more extreme members of each audience will seize on the aspects they find most objectionable rather than look for areas of compatibility.   This has long been a problem, but web 2.0 exacerbates it, since one blogger in an audience of hundreds can characterize a discussion for thousands of his compatriots back home.   

In other words, web 2.0 has as much or more capacity to puncture and disassemble public diplomacy messages as it does to deliver them.   The shorter the attention spans media, the more likely this is to be the case.   Twitter with its 140 character limit is a good example.   We have used Twitter successfully to send short messages and a give a “heads up” about bigger things, but it doesn’t easily lend itself to any proactive public affairs task beyond notices and reporting the equivalent of scores or stock averages.  One the other hand, 140 characters is plenty of space for a slogan or attack.  

BTW – the last two sentences of the paragraph above had 327 characters counting spaces.   These two directly above are 140 characters - exactly the right size for a tweet. Good luck with deep explanations.

So what do we do?

We look beyond or through the technology to our purpose.  You cannot answer the how question until you have address they why question.  Communication and relationship building is our goal.  Rather than be beguiled or intimidated by technology, we simply need to keep our focus on the goal and use whatever technological tools are most appropriate.  But we do need to acknowledge that changing technologies have changed the game.

Common themes not unified messages

There is much talk in public affairs about having a unified message.  The new technologies, with all the links and leaks they entail in the information net, mean we can no longer have one unified centrally crafted message.  We can have themes and goals that are interpreted and alerted by the individuals on the ground and closest to the challenges.   We will, however, need to tolerate significant local variations on the themes and welcome the ambiguity of message delivery.

Delivering variations on the themes is much more labor intensive than cranking out a single message because rather than one voice speaking to millions (on the model of the national television program) we will have many voices speaking to thousands or maybe even to hundreds and not only varying the theme to suit particular audiences, but also responding to them and quickly responsive to changes in the environment.  It is important that the theme be consistent but the delivery is protean.  It requires more of a robust process than a comprehensive plan.

Set the Proper Goals for Each Situation

There are many degrees of distinction between active opposition and enthusiastic support.   Americans are particularly afflicted by the desire to be loved in the world, but all that is often required is compliance or even indifference.  Although outright opposition constrains our policy options, America’s image in the world has no discernible impact on the sale of U.S. goods or the acceptance of U.S. cultural products.  Much of the sound and fury of anti-American prejudice signifies nothing or not very much.  The fragmentation of media on the web means that those who dislike us will always have an outlet for their vitriol and they will probably be among those yelping the loudest.  The majority may not have a strong opinion on a particular issue.  They may voice support for our opponents, but take no steps to provide anything practical. 

Military action, which by its very nature is coercive, will almost never be popular and any exercise of power, which inevitably means choosing among priorities, will annoy somebody.  Since you usually get less credit for the good things you do than blame for the bad, any use of power will probably create more perceived losers than winners.  (The world’s superpower is always on the hot seat.  President Clinton gets blamed for not sending troops to Rwanda; President Bush is excoriated for sending troops to Iraq.)  Lack of practical support for extremism and neutrality or even indifference toward our policies among the mass of a country’s people may be sufficient to accomplish our purposes.  Often neutralizing or discrediting opposition will be the most appropriate tact, and Internet is well suited to this task.  We should consider this on a case-by-case basis, rather than compromise practical goals by pursuing the chimera of seeking full throated outright approval.   

All of the above

Using technology to communicate will be an all of the above proposition, with a cocktail of technologies usually more appropriate than reliance on any one.  We will never find the Holy Grail or silver bullet of communications technology and we will never again have anything comparable to the nationwide television network where everybody is watching at the same time.   The ability to reach the whole nation was a historical anomaly.   Throughout most of history and in the future, the communication environment was and will be fractured.  It is only because we all grew up in that unusually homogeneous media environment that we think of it as normal in any way.  

The right tools

We cannot prescribe the particular technological tools for any public affairs task until we have assessed the task and the environment.   What we should be looking for is synergy among the tools.  For example, a live speaker is very compelling but not particularly memorable, while an internet page has the built in memory (you can refer back to it) but is unlikely to be compelling.  Twitter can announce the availability of some piece of information or some event, but it cannot explain the nuances.   An event might be very informative, but nobody comes unless they can be told and reminded.   Obviously a combination of technologies works best, changing them to adapt to circumstances.   BTW – technology is not only high tech or electronic.   A technology is merely a way of doing something.  A personal meeting is a kind of technology.   Sometime the thousands year old technology is the way to go.

We seek the right MIX of technologies, not the right ONE technology.  There is no silver bullet or Holy Grail of communications.  It is easy to be beguiled by the new or the latest big thing, but technology is not communication and the medium is not the message.  It is only the method. 

----------------------- 

1. Internet Overtakes Newspapers as News Source, Pew Research (http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1066/internet-overtakes-newspapers-as-news-source)
2.  Global Public Opinion in the Bush Years (2001-2008)    (http://pewglobal.org/reports/display.php?ReportID=263)

Other References

The Future of the Internet III, Pew Research (http://pewresearch.org/pubs/1053/future-of-the-internet-iii-how-the-experts-see-it)

Other information is based on personal interviews with those doing public diplomacy as well as extensive personal experience working with USG webpages and blogs.

Posted by Broadnax at 08:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I am reading “Predictably Irrational” about how we often make decisions not based on rational criteria w/o knowing it.   I have been interested the effects of irrational choices and random chance in decision making for many years.  If you recognize your bias and sources of uncertainty, you can make better decisions.   The down side of recognizing these limitations is … recognizing these limitations.   Everybody likes to believe they are rational and responsible.  It is also very hard to come to grips with the uncertainly inherent in all decisions.   

Uncertainty is part of ALL decisions.   If everything is cut and dry certain, there is no need for a decision.   You can just go with an ordinary rule of thumb or habit.  I don’t really decide to put on my seatbelt or brush my teeth in the morning.  I just do it.   You don’t want to make complicated decisions about every little event.  It would drive you crazy. But the habits and routines that easy life also can be traps.

Theory in decision making is starting to catch up with what many persuaders and decision makers have known intuitively for years.   Take the marketing example when a store offers good-better-best in a product line.    Markets know that given three choices, most people are likely to choose the middle one unless they have a strong prior preference. Clever marketers have the highest margin on the middle one. But how does this work?

It has to do with setting an anchor.   All values are really arbitrary. What you pay for a product is what you and others are willing to pay.  There is no “real” value.   How do you know what to pay?  By comparison.   But that comparison doesn’t need to be rational.   When you go out to buy something, you often don’t know what it is “worth.”   If the merchant can fix a price of say $100 in your mind, when he offers $100-10 or $90 you think it is a good deal.   If you had been fixed on $80 it would be a bad deal.  That is why the three choices work.  Few people buy the cheap one and almost nobody buys the most expensive.  The comparison makes you think the middle one has the reasonable price.